canada.com » Geoffrey Rowanhttp://o.canada.com
Canada's great, shareable storiesSun, 02 Aug 2015 20:28:37 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://1.gravatar.com/blavatar/15edae77ebfa450ee5bb897103fdef31?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.png » Geoffrey Rowanhttp://o.canada.com
9 PR-certified, science-based tips to help you score relationship points on Valentine’s Dayhttp://o.canada.com/life/these-nine-pr-certified-science-based-tips-will-help-you-score-relationship-points-on-valentines-day
http://o.canada.com/life/these-nine-pr-certified-science-based-tips-will-help-you-score-relationship-points-on-valentines-day#commentsTue, 11 Feb 2014 19:32:18 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=395983]]>Guys complain all the time that they don’t understand what women want, but guys, the bar is so low for Valentine’s Day. It’s almost an in idiot-proof occasion. Really. In a survey this week of two groups of women about Valentine’s Day communication, one woman listed an onion and another the offer to pick up McDonald’s on the way home as their favourite Valentine’s Day gifts.

We have to be able to at least match that.

In service to lovers and attempted lovers everywhere, we surveyed two groups of women on their attitudes and preferences related to communication on Valentine’s Day. For our purposes, we included giving a gift as a form of communication. This data, not adjusted for sexual preference, nevertheless provides an easy-to-follow road map to relationship bliss. (See above: idiot-proof).

Methodology: These surveys were conducted with the full scientific rigour and veracity of creationist Ken Ham. They have a margin of error that is biblical, and are questionable 99 times out of 100.

Another important methodology note: One group consists entirely of the women communication professionals at Ketchum Public Relations. They are skilled professional communicators, highly trained in the art and science of influence and persuasion. (Pity their partners at home trying to win an argument with them.) We call this group SuperWomen.

We then augmented the SuperWomen sample with a second group of women who randomly self-selected through various social media platforms. You could call this a double-blind study because neither group knew of the other group, but that’s not what a double-blind study is. (See above: Ken Ham scientific rigour.) We call the second group OtherWomen.

Here is the key to increasing your odds to score big-time relationship points on Valentine’s Day.

1. Put down your phone and get off your ass.

Even if it’s only to go to the drawer and get a paper and pen. SuperWomen and OtherWomen (who likely are also super) are both fairly evenly split on receiving a homemade card versus a store-bought card. (One respondent said a homemade card is “creepy,” so we strongly recommend that you don’t cut letters out of different magazines to make your homemade card. Otherwise be creative. Effort is appreciated in almost all relationship matters.)

Sadly, almost 70 per cent of OtherWomen don’t expect to get a card, while 70 percent of SuperWomen do. Being a well-trained, highly skilled communication professional is obviously good for one’s self-esteem and romantic life. We account for this large delta (a term we are using to infuse a false sense of scientific rigour into this piece) as the result of the results-oriented communication training members of the SuperWomen group have been through.

To our amazement, a small number of respondents said eCards and sentiments expressed on social media are acceptable. These women fall into a subset we refer to as Too-Good-For-You Women. One respondent thinks a billboard would be just fine, and another thought a text message was OK. We refer to her as Low-Self-Esteem Woman.

2. Know your audience.

Content is king, and most women in both samples prefer funny and romantic. But then, as Edmund Gwenn (the guy who played Santa in Miracle on 34th Street) famously said: “Dying is easy. Comedy is difficult.” Good luck with that.

Over-the-top, full-on sappiness was next on the list. A very small number of women are hoping for sexy communications. An even smaller number want “manly” or “inscrutable,” which may be the same thing.

3. Put down your phone and get off your ass. Really.

It bears repeating. About two-thirds of respondents in both groups enjoy Valentine’s Day as good clean fun. About 5 per cent think it is very important, and the remaining few think it’s a crass, commercial event. Work the odds, folks.

4. Actions speak louder than words.

You just have to decide what you want to say. We asked only the OtherWomen sample if they would accept less passionate, less frequent sex in exchange for their partner doing the laundry, regularly and properly. This question was based on last week’s cover story in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Even though that sounds very serious and credible, we didn’t pose it to the SuperWomen sample because we didn’t want a phone call from our director of Human Resources.

One third of respondents said yes, they would make that trade. There were no comments in the comments section. Silence speaks volumes. (No it doesn’t. That’s bad communication. We have no idea what it means.)

5. Valentine’s Day is an emotional mine field.

The longer the relationship, the lower the expectations (or so they say), yet a snub in grade four still stings. See No. 1 and No. 3. A third of respondents said their biggest worry would be receiving no Valentine, a third said it would be receiving an awkward Valentine, and a third said it would be breaking someone’s heart. But the comments for this question stand on their own:

Been married 12 years. One commercial holiday isn’t gonna make or break the deal!

Lack of chocolate

No worries, married for 36.5 years. Lowered expectations…

Being a single introverted middle aged woman who can’t deal with computer dating and will end life talking to her pet

That I will lose my mind, drink too much wine and make a phone call I might regret.

Overeating

The wine will run out.

6. Size matters.

You don’t want to go too big, or too small, or be non-existent, said respondents about their worst Valentines.

“A donut and a plastic rose. I mean, a donut??” (Well sure, but an onion was great?!?)

“You stink. Grade 4.”

“A six-foot bouquet of hundreds of roses sent to my desk by a colleague whom I had no romantic feelings for … It was so big that word got around and people came by to take pictures all day.

7. A little bit of original thought goes a long way.

The most common answer to the “best” and “worst” questions was, “I don’t remember.” #PRFail. Remember, most respondents either like Valentine’s Day, or think it is really important, and are disappointed when they don’t get something. Do the math. Here are a few descriptions of favourite Valentine’s Day gestures, which show how easy it is to score points. So easy a five-year-old can do it, as you’ll see.

“Do you want me to grab some McDonald’s on the way?”

“An email from a long distance boyfriend describing the day that would have occurred if we were in the same city.”

“I’m sure it’s coming this Valentine’s Day.” (No pressure, somebody.

“Coming home to a room full of beautiful helium balloons.

“I got a nice Carol Anne Duffy poem and an onion once. That was novel!”

“Love you til the end of space, and space never ends (from my then 5 year old)”

“I love you!”

“I couldn’t live without you.”

“An anonymous bunch of flowers saying ‘someone loves you’”

8. Pop the question at your own risk.

Two-thirds said, no. It’s cheesy. One third said it’s OK. About the same for both sample groups.

9. Valentine’s Day isn’t about return on investment.

It’s about spreading that loving feeling in the moment. That’s because according to the survey, a Valentine’s Day card as an opening romantic gambit almost never results in a relationship. The one respondent who said it did also included the comment: “He’s now my ex!”

Everything old is new again and so the evasive practice of ignoring the elephant in the room to stay on message, no matter how absurd the message, took root among our leaders again in 2013, most famously by Rob Ford and his combative brother Doug, but also elsewhere.

Every year, the public relations professionals at Ketchum Canada PR track hundreds of newsmakers as they deal with potentially damaging issues in business, government, news, sports, and the arts. The results reveal trends in communication and identify valuable lessons. This is Ketchum’s 10th annual ranking to recognize skillful, colourful and effective communication as well as the verbose, impenetrable and downright stupid. By tradition, the 10th anniversary is the year of tin, which is appropriate as so many leaders demonstrated tin ear in 2013 – tone deafness to the concerns of those around them.

Lesson One: Never discuss your oral sex preferences in a media scrum, and other absurdities

Year after year, month after month, Rob Ford has violated every tenet of good leadership and credible communication, yet he retains support among a core group that may yet re-elect him. The Ford body of work in 2013 is too extensive to précis and too absurd to parody, but there is a strong hint to his success in the recent CBC News report of brother Doug giving out $20 bills to constituents at a community housing apartment building.

For a segment of the population that feels unrepresented in the corridors of power, the physical evidence of a politician giving them a hard currency benefit may be more than anyone else can overcome. Money talks, even if a $20 in hand is a short-term gain that buys long-term pain.

There have been other scoundrels in public office. There have even been scoundrels who have been re-elected. All that is clear to a group of professionals dedicated to the communication skills of leaders is that Rob Ford possesses none.

Lesson Two: If you must twist and turn to avoid saying the obvious, you’ve got credibility issues

Less offensive than anything Mr. Ford has uttered this year, but still a communication fail, MP Jeff Watson, Parliamentary Secretary to the Transport Minister, was interviewed by Anna Maria Tremonti about rail safety in the wake of the Lac Megantic tragedy. He responded with a Tolkien-esque verbal voyage — a spectacular quest to avoid a straight answer to a straight question. It boiled down to this:

Really? Present in our system? Not very comforting. Mr. Watson had some compelling statistics that should have allowed him to answer the question. Anything less than a straight answer to a straight question appears evasive and impugns your credibility. He could have answered: “Our railways are safe but some accidents do still happen, so we’re always looking for ways to improve safety.”

Mr. Watson seemed so intent on not getting caught saying either “our railways are safe” or “our railways are not safe” that he talked himself into a ridiculous knot.

Lesson Three: Plain language makes communication better

The city of Calgary has adopted a policy to require government to use plain language instead of the often incomprehensible jargon and bureaucrat-speak. Let’s hope this is a trend, but maybe not as plain as Rob Ford language.

Plain language means “that the majority of people can read and understand your message the first time they read it.” the policy says. Information should be clear, concise, well-organized, easily understood and acted on by the intended audience.

“Language,” said Alderman. Druh Farrell, who brought forward the policy, “shouldn’t be exclusive or alienating.”

Bravo!

Lesson Four: Take the high road, without throwing people under buses

When issues mount up, there’s often a powerful temptation to get defensive and try to deflect criticism by blaming others (Rob Ford blames the media elites; Stephen Harper blames Nigel Wright.) It’s rarely a winning strategy, as Lululemon former chairman and co-founder Chip Wilson found out when he blamed his customers for being too fat to wear some Lululemon yoga pants.

“It’s really about the rubbing through the thighs, how much pressure is there,” Mr. Wilson tried to explain, around the foot in his mouth. “Quite frankly, some women’s bodies just actually don’t work for [the pants].”

One of the most consistent findings in the 2013 Ketchum Leadership Communication Monitor, which surveys people on their perceptions of leaders, was the desire for leaders to tackle issues head on and forget the spin. People crave leaders who are honest about challenges, clear in how to deal with them, collaborative in finding solutions and practical in their actions.

The good news is the Lululemon board seems to meet those leadership criteria, based on the outcome for Mr. Wilson.

An Air Canada spokesman became a master of the email fail this year, in an unintentionally public way. (Extra Lesson: If it exists and it might be embarrassing, it will become public.)

The spokesman allowed his frustration with media interest in a lost-dog story to go public when he accidentally sent an email to a news station that he thought he was sending internally.

He was trying to advise a colleague who was dealing with a reporter on the story of a dog in the airline’s care that escaped, was hit by a car and later euthanized:

“I think I would just ignore, it is local news doing a story on a lost dog. Their entire government is shut down and about to default and this is how the U.S. media spends its time.”

The spokesman said he regretted this email, but didn’t think it fair that he was characterized as callous or uncaring. He also said the email was partly meant to be a joke, but he was also exasperated by questions for which he had no answers.

To be clear, he was cast as callous and uncaring because he sounded callous and uncaring. Just because Air Canada didn’t have anything new to say doesn’t mean it should stop communicating, or stop showing compassion. His claim it was meant to be partly a joke rings hollow. What part was the joke?

Given the email was meant for internal consumption, what does one conclude about Air Canada culture?

Lesson Six: Leaders Communicate, Show Compassion, and Serve

Canada’s largest public transit system, The Toronto Transit Authority, is in the news almost every day and it takes a lot of heat for service disruptions. But the tone set at the top, and replicated throughout the TTC’s communication function, is that it will take the heat, respond to it in a thoughtful way, and continue the dialogue with Torontonians.

after one especially long service outage this year, when lesser leaders might be in hiding, TTC CEO Andy Byford took to the air to explain a delay during rush hour had been caused by a water leaking onto an aging signal system. Mr. Byford was credible, genuine, thoughtful and knowledgeable. He took responsibility repeatedly, explained what needs to be done and demonstrated he is listening to TTC patrons, even under the most difficult, not-fun circumstances.

The lesson for the rest of us: when we let people down, they want to feel we have heard them and understand how they were affected.

Lesson Seven: It doesn’t cost a lot to be smart and bold with social media

From a communications point of view, there were no winners in the 2012-2013 NHL lock-out. Neither the players nor the league had a compelling, believable story that explained why hard-working fans, whose dollars and loyalty are worth many billions of dollars, were being deprived of their game.

But Boston Pizza stepped in with an inspired offer to help the billionaires divide the pie. In an open letter to both sides on Facebook, Boston Pizza spoke for all fans: “Okay guys, the joke is getting old. Can we please get back to playing?”

The restaurant chain offered to supply a negotiating venue “and a session of endless All Meat Wings & beer to both of you in exchange for you sitting down together and finally hashing this thing out. Don’t worry; we’ll avoid pizza so you don’t argue over the toppings.”

Playing off the news can be risky for a corporation. There have been many fails in that area. But Facebook was a great choice among the PESO (paid, earned, shared, owned) channels. It is a platform for dialogue. And Boston Pizza got the tone just right. Cheeky, but made the point.

Cost to Boston Pizza zero dollars.
Result: Tons of media positive coverage and Facebook fans, and the labour dispute was resolved. OK, maybe BP doesn’t get credit for that last bit.

Lesson Eight: If You Are Going to Mock Our Democracy, Be Entertaining

Conservative MP Paul Calandra was tapped to handle many of the tough questions in the House of Commons about the Senate scandal, perhaps because his answers so often indicate only the most ephemeral contact with relevance.

For example, asked during Question Period how many lawyers from the Prime Minister’s Office were involved in setting up the secret deal with Sen. Mike Duffy, Mr. Calendra gave a rambling, wide ranging response that never came within a stone’s throw of the question. National Post columnist Andrew Coyne @acoyne captured the chagrin of most observers with his tweet: “That was the most complete non-answer in the history of QP.”

Speaking of the Senate scandal, Prime Minister Harper and most of the Conservative Party have so thoroughly and completely thrown one of their most loyal, successful and respected colleagues under the bus that former Harper Chief of Staff Nigel Wright has been described as being like “a speed bump at the Greyhound station …”

Mr. Wright has kept his own counsel throughout the scandal, eschewing the blowhard tactics of Messrs. Ford and Duffy. Silence is working for him because he carried a sterling reputation from Bay Street into the PMO, and maintained it while in Ottawa. Reputation matters. In this case, his silence matches the narrative: an honourable man taking the fall for a cause he believes in.

Lesson Ten: Be Gracious In Defeat

Nothing is more Canadian than hockey, so when Rogers Communications scored a major upset by scooping national NHL TV rights for $5.2-billion, it wouldn’t have been hard to imagine some bitterness from the national broadcaster.

Instead, CBC/Radio-Canada President Hubert Lacroix was a strong voice in this huge story, explaining what the deal means for the iconic Hockey Night in Canada brand and its fans, as well as what the changing economics of NHL TV rights means. “We’re out of that game now.”

Mr. Lacroix did a good job of explaining the economic reality of the situation, offering a hopeful message to hockey fans across Canada, and sounding a cooperative and appreciative note to Rogers, with whom it will have some opportunities to collaborate. It was smart, well-managed, well-delivered messaging that was on strategy for the CBC, with very high stakes. We were left feeling there was no loser in this competition.

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/rob-ford-wins-wizard-of-oz-leadership-award-tin-ear-serious-questions-about-heart-and-brains/feed0tin-man-from-the-wizard-of-oz-the-wizard-of-oz-4129262-550-403geoffreyrowanOpportunity cost of the Rob Ford distraction just keeps growinghttp://o.canada.com/business/opportunity-cost-of-the-rob-ford-distraction-just-keeps-growing
http://o.canada.com/business/opportunity-cost-of-the-rob-ford-distraction-just-keeps-growing#commentsTue, 21 May 2013 21:41:48 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=252008]]>While Toronto tries to figure out how to raise $200,000 to buy video evidence of our chief executive’s moral turpitude from drug dealers, other cities in the world are doing good and useful things that might result in better lives for their citizens.

This is as good an example of the concept of “opportunity cost” as you will ever find. Every day that Rob Ford fuels his flying circus is another day on the march toward distracted mediocrity for Toronto. It’s another day we cede the initiative to other cities.

For example, while we are trying to fund Crackstarter in order to buy a cell-phone video of a bloated, red-faced and apparently wrecked man who has yet to be definitively identified, an organization called Digital Shoreditch is also using crowdsource funding to lure a startup technology company to the hip, edgy, East London neighbourhood of Shoreditch. Dozens of companies have already applied at http://www.millionpoundstartup.com to be part of the initiative to attract high-growth technology companies, and the jobs and talented people and innovation that come with those companies.

It’s all about choices and priorities.

The Shoreditch competition is smart and strategic. Promoted by the Mayor of London, it’s the kind of thing – and kind of thinking — that Canada and Toronto would be well served by. It might even be the kind of thing an undistracted, libertarian local mayor might promote for the economic health of the city.

“Toronto can do a lot better job to position itself as a leading start-up ecosystem,” said Mark Evans, one of Canada’s most respected start-up consultants. “It doesn’t take a lot of money. We need to do a better job of embracing startups because they are going to be one of our key assets.”

Of course Mr. Evans was talking only about Toronto as a home for startup companies when he said Toronto can do better.

But Toronto can do better on the leadership front as well. Regardless of Mr. Ford’s guilt or innocence in any of the many crimes, misdemeanors and insults associated with him, his tenure as mayor has been pure opportunity cost. It grows every day.

The former adviser to Prime Minister Harper, former campaign manager for Alberta’s Wildrose party, CBC commentator, conservative operative and University of Calgary professor, Flanagan restated comments he made in 2009 to the effect that he sees viewing child porn as a victimless crime.

“To what extent [do] we put people in jail for doing something in which they do not harm another person.”

First of all, it seems to be on his mind a lot because he said this during a public meeting on First Nations issues. Must have been sitting there daydreaming.

It also appears Prof. Flanagan does not understand the concept of photography — that through technical means, reflected light is captured in a physical manifestation of a moment in time that actually occurred. In the case of child porn it is concrete evidence of a criminal act, not a cartoon bubble from his fevered imagination.

After much public outcry, Prof. Flanagan issued an apology. It was half-assed. In it, he ducks responsibility.

“Last night, in an academic setting, I raised a theoretical question about how far criminalization should extend toward the consumption of pornography.”

No, last night in a campus meeting about changes to the Indian Act, he said no one is harmed by the consumption of child pornography. In fact, by definition someone had to be harmed for anyone to consume child pornography.

Prof. Flanagan tries to make it sound like he was having a scholarly conversation about esoteric nuances of civil rights. But if you listen to the tape or read the transcript it’s clear he thinks child porn is a victimless crime. He makes no connection between the harmless piece of paper on which there appears an image, and the harmful act of an adult with a child to produce that image.

In my day job as a professional communication consultant, I look for a lesson in every PR screw up. As a committed supporter of free speech it pains me to report the only lesson I could take away from this one. Some people just shouldn’t speak.

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/calgary-child-porn-apologists-apology-falls-far-short/feed0Tom FlanagangeoffreyrowanNew cooking trend signals the end of dayshttp://o.canada.com/life/new-cooking-trend-signals-the-end-of-days
http://o.canada.com/life/new-cooking-trend-signals-the-end-of-days#commentsFri, 15 Feb 2013 21:14:14 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=200568]]>Cooking blogs are a flambé, and the Twitterverse is double-boiling, all because of a little melon baller the New York Times has thrown into the world of haute cuisine with its story on the Ikea-ization of cooking — a trend made necessary because “cooking is hard.”

So hard, in fact, that the Times reports on the new trend of cooking by kit – a sort of pretend kitchen work that’s more akin to black-velvet, paint-by-number portraiture or model airplane building than it is to the stuff of real chef-ery.

It seems that several companies have sprung up that will provide everything you need for a quality meal – right down to the pinch of salt – along with detailed instructions. You provide the labour, just like assembling a Vika Alex set of drawers from Ikea. Not sure who provides the Allen wrenches.

Among some gastronomes, this is the final sign of the end of days – four horseman of the apocalypse, al-Mahdi or Vishnu on a white stallion, choose your poison. (Why are horses so prominent in end-of-days mythology?) We have become so degenerate that we can’t shop for or measure out our own ingredients to properly cook a meal. It’s scandalous.

But before you head for your panic room (with Sub-Zero refrigerator/freezer, La Cornue range, Gaggenau wall oven) think back a few years to your exuberant youth. If you were anything like me, your taste in fine wines trended toward a precocious little frizzante rosé I’ll call Mateus (because that’s its name) but your everyday-basement-makeout-party wines were more likely Boones Farm Green Apple and Boones Farm Strawberry Hill. Add a little Grateful Dead, maybe some Guess Who and you were golden.

My point (and I know you were wondering how many more parentheticals you’d have to wade through before I got to a point) is that certain foods and beverages are training products for the real thing. Cooking is no harder than drinking wine. All it takes is time and commitment. And cooking good food is no harder than drinking good wine. Both can provide immense pleasure, and both require more time and maturity to derive that immense pleasure.

But here’s a hopeful thought that may soothe your jangled nerves and stall your descent into full-on get-off-my-lawn-you-rotten-kids curmudgeonhood: once you’ve been exposed to orange-glazed duck or ginger-salmon mousse, it’s hard to go back to chicken nuggets and fish sticks. These meals-on-training-wheels serve an important purpose. They expose people to a whole new realm of possibilities. My eyes were opened for good during a dinner with my father in the early 1980s. He decided it was time for me to grow up and introduced me to Puligny-Montrachet. Mateus hasn’t passed my lips since, and that’s not because I quit drinking wine.

So, have faith. Cooking by kit is not the beginning of the end but rather the continuation of the middle you are witnessing.

Bonne appetite.

(with files from Jon Higgins)

]]>http://o.canada.com/life/new-cooking-trend-signals-the-end-of-days/feed0Evan Sun NYTgeoffreyrowanMost stressful jobs? PR is #5. Please send Scotchhttp://o.canada.com/news/most-stressful-jobs-pr-is-5-please-send-scotch
http://o.canada.com/news/most-stressful-jobs-pr-is-5-please-send-scotch#commentsThu, 17 Jan 2013 16:29:58 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=183488]]>There is one thing that people who work in public relations know with certainty. Our moms don’t have a clue what we do. Neither do our dads, spouses or children. That makes it hard to claim you’ve had a stressful day because they think the toughest part of your day is choosing brown liquor or clear from the office booze cart, a la Mad Men. But now there’s proof. Public relations has been rated the world’s fifth most stressful profession by the job search company CareerCast, ahead of police officers, taxi drivers, newspaper reporters and senior corporate executives. Here’s how you explain it to mom.

People get most stressed when they have responsibility for (and are judged on) an outcome, but they have little authority to affect that outcome. It’s like judging the weatherman on the weather, rather than the accuracy of the weather forecast.

So, as a PR professional you may be responsible for getting a glowing story in the (National Post, Wall Street Journal, Times of London, whatever) that describes your client’s leader as having the heart of Gandhi, brains of Einstein, vision of Steve Jobs and business acumen of Warren Buffet. The PR person’s only lever to make this happen is persuasiveness. He/she must convince a cynical, skeptical reporter to write a fluffy, promotional piece highlighting only the very best information about the client. Of course, no credible reporter will do that, so we start from the position that under the best possible circumstances, if everything goes right, the goal is unattainable.

Still, the PR person dutifully tries to find a positive yet newsworthy angle to meet the journalist’s requirement that the story have some element of conflict and transformation. (There are no bad stories, only bad PR people.)

Often this is where the client gives the PR person helpful direction.

“You’ve got to focus on the fact that we are a strategic, cutting edge company, a global leader with leading strategic solutions and that our revolutionary prizo-digi-voltaic innovative diphthong solution positions us for strategic growth and strategic performance. I know everybody else already has prizo-digi-voltaic diphthong solutions but we need the market to know that we do too. And whatever you do, don’t let them mention in the story that the CEO has been charged with embezzlement and theft of intellectual property … And we have to see the article first before it is printed.”

When you apply this reality to the PR agency environment, where each PR person serves three to 10 clients, you multiply the stress by the number of clients. (Except at Ketchum, where we are uniquely fortunate to have only smart, attractive clients who are skilled communication professionals and with whom we work in close partnership to achieve measurable business objectives.)

And you add other agency stressors – your boss’s expectation that your clients must love you, you must meet your targets for billable hours, you must be continuously upgrading your skills and your professional relationships, and you have to be good at the office karaoke party or there will be intra-office buzz. “Her performance had more keys than a janitor.”

And you have to be good at the office karaoke party or there will be intra-office buzz

Then there’s the pressure you put on yourself, because most people want to do great work.

And the very personal nature of feedback. You pour your heart into writing something you think is smart and effective, and your manager or your client comes back and says: “I’d really like it if you could find a more creative way to pitch our prizo-digi-voltaic diphthong solutions as a feature story for Moms and Tots Magazine, but don’t use so many words. Also, you took all the industry jargon out and didn’t even say once how strategic and innovative it is, so put all those words back in. Can you get me the revisions yesterday morning?”

After you’ve spent weeks going to meetings, developing plans, and writing and rewriting press releases, tweets, blog posts etc. to create success for the strategic prizo-digi-voltaic diphthong solutions, on the very day you issue the “revolutionary” news and are waiting for reporters to besiege you with request for interviews, Apple and IBM announce they have merged and have compressed the entire Internet onto a wristband that reads your mind and automatically anticipates your every need, materializing it beside you instantly. Want a piece of pizza? Bing, there it is. No one is interested in diphthong solutions.

So your client says: “You didn’t get me any coverage. Why should I pay for that?”

And your best friend who graduated from PR school at the same time as you – two years ago – was just promoted to senior vice president and is being sent to Paris for two weeks of pastry-identification-and-movie-star-relations with Brangelina. You think your life sucks.

So yes, mom, there can be stress in PR. Yes mom, that’s why Don Draper drinks so much…”

“No mom, he’s not in PR. He’s in advertising. That’s not what I do …”

“No mom, it’s not the same thing …”

“Yes mom, I probably am drinking too much.”

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/most-stressful-jobs-pr-is-5-please-send-scotch/feed1MADMEN-don-drapergeoffreyrowanSpence resignation should be refused; lots for everyone to learn from thishttp://o.canada.com/news/spence-resignation-should-be-refused-lots-for-everyone-to-learn-from-this
http://o.canada.com/news/spence-resignation-should-be-refused-lots-for-everyone-to-learn-from-this#commentsFri, 11 Jan 2013 02:39:58 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=180862]]>What Chris Spence did when he plagiarized was lazy and dishonest. That does not mean Spence is a lazy and dishonest person. It means that he did something that was. I don’t know him but by most reports he is a respected administrator and dedicated educator. Allowing him to resign is a waste of a man’s career, a shot in the foot of the Toronto District School Board when it can least afford it, and a waste of an opportunity to teach students – and all of us – a few important lessons.

If the TDSB does not reject Spence’s resignation the lesson taught is that screwing up is fatal. It teaches that even if you take responsibility for your misdeed, even if you make a sincere apology that acknowledges the damage you caused, and even if you humble yourself and take action to rebuild trust, you are be beyond redemption. One strike and you’re out.

It is beyond ironic that this is happening at the same time the most insincere apology in years was delivered by the NHL’s Gary Bettman. Mr. Bettman will cause the same economic and social hardship all over again in a heartbeat if it suits his purposes. Spence, on the other hand, will never plagiarize again.

What Spence’s departure teaches students is that there is no hope to recover from a stupid act. There is no way to make amends. Was this act of plagiarism beyond rehabilitation? No. Spence is not Jerry Sandusky.

What school kid doesn’t at some point do something truly stupid? What adult? “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone.” (John 8:7, the Bible) Don’t we want to teach our kids to take responsibility for their actions, to accept the consequences, to learn from them, and to move forward? What we are teaching them is it doesn’t pay to do that. The response is going to be nuclear, so you’re better off ducking and weaving, hiding and obfuscating. Repeat drunk drivers get unlimited second chances, but a respected educator gets the career death penalty?

I don’t know Chris Spence, but I know that across the panoply of human failings, I’d rather work with people who own up to their wrong-doings, who take responsibility when they cause harm, who are truly remorseful when they break a trust, and who take steps to ensure it won’t happen again.

Bad stuff will happen to every organization that involves human beings.

In my world of crisis communication there is a fundamental truism. Bad stuff will happen to every organization that involves human beings. Usually, you will be judged more harshly on what you did when the bad thing happened than on the fact it did happen.

Unless they know something else about Spence’s capabilities or character, the TDSB should refuse to accept his resignation and use this is an important lesson on accountability, resilience and life-long learning.

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/spence-resignation-should-be-refused-lots-for-everyone-to-learn-from-this/feed0PJT-TDSB-7.jpggeoffreyrowanCanada’s new spam-killer law could trip up journalists, PR, social mediahttp://o.canada.com/news/canadas-new-spam-killer-law-could-trip-up-journalists-pr-social-media
http://o.canada.com/news/canadas-new-spam-killer-law-could-trip-up-journalists-pr-social-media#commentsWed, 09 Jan 2013 20:12:08 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=179632]]>When the U.S. outlawed booze in the 1920s, gangsters took over that business and made truckloads of cash that they used to build criminal empires. The golden age of crime was an “unintended consequence.”

Canada’s new anti-spam law is intended to eliminate annoying bulk emails selling miracle-grow male enhancers and Nigerian embezzlement scams but its unintended consequence could be to choke the symbiotic relationship between journalism and public relations and to put a chill on social media and even journalism.

Canada’s Anti-Spam Act (Bill C-28) has passed and received Royal Assent but Ottawa held enactment for a consultation period in 2011. Since then it clarified some of the language in the bill in order to provide exemptions for businesses that weren’t the intended target but would nevertheless suffer from the broad application of the Act. Last week (Jan. 5, 2013) Industry Canada published a revised version of its proposed regulations, incorporating the changes. It’s now subject to a 30-day consultation period that ends Feb. 4.

The intent of the legislation is to create a more secure online environment by deterring the most damaging and deceptive forms of spam from occurring in Canada. That’s a good thing. Spam is used to steal personal data, including banking and credit card information. It’s used to perpetrate fraud, to gain illicit access to computer systems, and to make false or misleading representations in the online marketplace. It spreads viruses and zombifies your computers. It’s a bad thing.

But one Canadian privacy lawyer calls the new anti-spam bill “overreaching” and said it is an awkwardly written piece of legislation.

“The legislation is very broad and could have significant business implications beyond what is intended,” said Barbara McIsaac, counsel at one of Canada’s largest and most prestigious law firms, Borden Ladner Gervais LLP.

Let’s start with the easiest part to understand. Since the invention of email, public relations professionals have sent unsolicited emails to journalists suggesting story ideas. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Reporters can’t cover or even know everything that is going on within the sectors and beats they cover. PR people, if they are any good, point them to interesting, newsworthy stories. If the pitch stands up to the journalist’s scrutiny, it gets covered by an independent, skeptical professional. That coverage is much more valuable than advertising because it has more credibility. But under the new law, sending an unsolicited email to a reporter would be illegal and the PR person subject to hefty fines unless the journalist has given prior consent. Even with prior consent, every email must have an opt-out option.

OK, that’s not so bad. From my experience (previously as a journalist and now as a PR guy) I know that most reporters welcome – or at least accept – relationships with PR people as sometimes useful. So, we send out a request for consent to all journalists (never mind that it’s not clear how you request consent in an unsolicited email without breaking the law).

But there are some reporters who despise PR as a profession, or they despise certain PR professionals as crass, useless, slap-head toadies who aren’t worth the bile that holds them together (not my words, Eric Reguly).
OK, so don’t email those people. But of course nothing is ever that easy. What happens when a US company pitches a story idea to a Canadian journalist? What happens when someone joins the media outlet’s staff, or leaves, or switches beats, and the preferences change? What happens when a group of journalists who despise the PR profession decide to launch a class-action lawsuit against a company to multiply the damages?

All of a sudden what is mostly a helpful relationship becomes fraught with the threat of lawsuits and big fines. It puts an onerous burden on small PR firms, or small companies with limited internal resources. It restricts their ability to tell their stories in a way that may create value.

But that’s just PR, you say. They’ll figure it out.

It’s email spam!

OK, let’s look at the other side of the coin. Let’s say you’re a journalist who wants to interview an executive of XYZ Corp. You’re resourceful. You find the email address of the executive and you send her an unsolicited note requesting the interview. Maybe it’s a tough time for XYZ Corp. and that exec doesn’t want to be in the news media, but you’re a persistent reporter. It’s how you made your career. You keep trying, leaving phone calls and emails and direct message tweets and Facebook page comments and messages via LinkedIn. Then suddenly you find yourself charged with violating Canada’s anti-spam law.

But you protest, “I’m a journalist writing a news story.”

Well, you work for a for-profit commercial enterprise that is in the business of providing content to paying subscribers. You are writing news stories for a commercial purpose. You are interviewing newsmakers for a commercial purpose. You are sending out unsolicited emails for a commercial purpose.

It becomes even fuzzier if you’re not covering hard news for a respected hard news outlet. Is there a journalistic purpose to sending tips to mom bloggers asking them for their cutest holiday stories? No, not really. It’s all commercial purpose. You want to get readers, watchers, subscribers, advertisers and/or sponsors.

At the much richer end of the marketing spectrum, what of sponsored content that gets pushed out to people electronically, without their consent? The anti-spam law says it is technology agnostic. It doesn’t care what the delivery mechanism is. Can we issue a class-action law suit against Twitter for dropping sponsored tweets into our streams? Can we sue the giant advertising conglomerates that track our web habits and, in a fraction of a second, auction us to the highest bidder with the winner earning the right to drop an unsolicited ad on our desktop? That’s a multi-billion dollar industry but I, for one, am tired of having forklifts and luxury watches thrust at me every time I log on.

The point is that Canada’s anti-spam legislation is deeply flawed, which might be as much the fault of the media, marketing and PR communities as it is of the authors of the bill. Industry associations for those sectors need to step up and contribute to a more effective law that achieves its goals without creating the unintended consequence of shackling those who are doing most to create the online communities and commerce that the bill seeks to protect.

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/canadas-new-spam-killer-law-could-trip-up-journalists-pr-social-media/feed0how-viagra-spam-works-largegeoffreyrowanSpam is itBroken hearted by Newtown murders? You’ll get over it.http://o.canada.com/news/broken-hearted-by-newtown-murders-youll-get-over-it
http://o.canada.com/news/broken-hearted-by-newtown-murders-youll-get-over-it#commentsSun, 16 Dec 2012 22:51:36 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=169451]]>Those of us who are heartbroken by the latest murders of so many perfect, tiny children and their teachers in Connecticut – the evisceration of so many families and communities — can take comfort in one thought. We’ll get used to it. We’ll become inured to it. We always do.

Humans have a remarkable capacity to adapt to new realities. We see children forced to become killer soldiers, or sold into sexual slavery in a global human trafficking business that’s as big as the international weapons or drug trades and we accept that. We have changed the planet’s climate to deleterious effect – melting glaciers and ice caps. We’ve seen rain forests razed. We’ve seen entire species eradicated. Warring drug cartels form part of the common backdrop in some regions. What are you going to do?

In our histories we have seen entire peoples eliminated and enslaved. Today we see rape, torture and starvation widely adopted as tools of pacification, and we’ve learned to distract ourselves – to force it out of our daily consciousness. We accept that some nation states will live in a state of perpetual war; that some people will live in slag heaps on tailings ponds, root through toxic industrial garbage dumps and that millions will suffer and die from illnesses that are easily treated or prevented. We navigate around it. That’s just the way it is.

When confronted in our daily lives with the common plagues of homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction, we have developed a strong, self-protective mechanism that allows us to see through the human evidence that we pass on the streets and put it out of our minds.

“As a nation, we have endured far too many of these tragedies in the last few years,” said Pres. Obama, in his heart-felt remarks after the Newtown murders.

Apparently not. It still breaks too many of our hearts. For all the exploded bodies, gutted families, stolen futures and exsanguinated communities we have seen, we still aren’t used to it yet. We still don’t completely accept as normal and commonplace the discussions of the ability of a six-year-old child’s body to absorb the energy of a bullet at close range. Such talk still summons burning tears of impotent rage.

But we’ll get there. We’re on the right path. We just have to keep doing what we’re doing.

TORONTO, Dec. 12, 2012 – Trust and credibility are often a slow build. They come one interaction at a time. Mess up and you go back to square one, like Conrad Black did after a pompous, self-delusional attack on a BBC interviewer, or Rob Ford did every time he opened his mouth in 2012.

This ninth annual ranking by Ketchum Public Relations Canada recognizes skillful, colourful and effective communication as well as the verbose, impenetrable and downright stupid. Every year, Ketchum PR professionals track hundreds of newsmakers as they deal with potentially damaging issues in business, government, news, sports, and the arts. The results reveal trends in communication and identify valuable lessons.

This year there was one public figure who made us want to run through walls to see her succeed. She told her story. She engaged us. She inspired us. Hélène Campbell made us glad to be alive and glad she is alive.

Lesson 1: We love hope, progress and overcoming adversity
The 20-year-old Ottawa woman was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a disease that hardens the lungs and can only be treated with a transplant. In January Hélène made a personal plea on Twitter to inspire more potential organ donors. A few days later, Justin Bieber responded, retweeting her message to his 16 million followers. (Honourable mention to the Biebs for using his celebrity so effectively.) Overnight, Hélène became a celebrity. Thousands signed organ donor cards.

Facing a life-threatening disease, she had a stronger sense of priorities than most. Fame didn’t shake her from her message. This doesn’t mean I get my transplant any sooner than where I am on the list, she said, but it raises awareness for organ donation and that helps everyone who is waiting and wondering if they will get a new organ before they die.

Then she had her transplant, and while recovering used her celebrity to inspire others and to continue to promote organ donation.

“I’m fortunate that lungs were there in time for me … but there are people who wait up to two years, or some people don’t get that gift. And I’m so thankful to my donor and their family … In such a critical time when they’re mourning the loss of their loved one, they’re able to consider someone else,” she said.

We signed our donor cards, wiped our eyes and rejoiced to see her dancing with Ellen.

Lesson 2: Silence is usually a stupid strategy, XL Foods

Not always, but usually.
In a crisis, you want to be the best source of information for stories about you. When human health and possibly lives are at stake, you want to show a little humanity. XL Foods failed on all counts.

As its tainted food crisis worsened over weeks, the company issued a few statements, quoting no one. Its top management was nowhere to be seen for several weeks. We were not comforted that they were doing all they could to fix the problem. We ate a lot more chicken.

Lesson 3: We don’t have high expectations for politicians, but really …
From the sublime to the ridiculous. While Hélène Campbell proves you can have great effect promoting a cause selflessly, Safety Minister Vic Toews demonstrates no approach is too low for some politicians. Toews took the “fer-us-or-agin-us” dichotomy to a whole new, smelly place. Arguing for his own plan for increased online monitoring, he said that you either sided with the government “or with the child pornographers.”

Lesson 4: Don’t Make it Worse When You Get Caught Screwing Up

Rule number one in crisis communications is that bad stuff will happen, guaranteed. In most cases, you are more harshly judged by what you did after the bad thing happened than by the bad thing itself. Even when it happens to journalists. When the high-profile US journalist Fareed Zakaria was nailed for writings very similar to a Jill Lepore New Yorker essay, he tore the Band-Aid off quickly.

“I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers.” Done and done.

But when Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente made a similar mistake, both she and the Globe dragged a one-day story out over a couple of weeks. First the Globe tried to sweep it under the rug with a dismissive comment from an editor. Then Wente tried to explain it away by casting herself as victim.

“I’m far from perfect. I make mistakes. But I’m not a serial plagiarist. What I often am is a target for people who don’t like what I write.”

Four sentences, every one of them true, but both the Globe and Wente could have saved themselves a lot of trouble and a lot of piling on if they just did what Zakaria did.

Lesson 5: The Don’t-Shoot-Yourself Rule — If the Communication Plan is Working, Stick With It

He’s not a Canadian so he doesn’t really qualify, but because he lives in Canada we were all ready to give Conrad Black the 2012 Most Improved Player Award for resuscitating a reputation so moribund we thought he’d need rehabilitation just to be credible as a Three-Card Monte dealer. Starting with his release from prison, homecoming to Toronto, and step-by-step re-entry into the company of the non-convicted, he played it just right, and it was working.

Then he agreed to an interview with BBC journalist Jeremy Paxman, and took issue with being called a convicted criminal, which he is. As the interview got hotter, Black said he was proud of “being able to endure a discussion like this without getting up and smashing your face in.” He also called Paxman “a priggish, gullible British fool.” (Point of order: Takes one to know one.)

There was a point in Tom Cruise’s career when he dropped his reliable PR advisor. Soon thereafter he was bouncing up and down on Oprah’s couch. Black has met his Tom-Cruise-on-Oprah’s-Couch moment.

Lesson 6: Keep Foot Out of Mouth If You Can Manage It
Remember a few years ago when we lauded Rob Ford for having a simple, engaging message that he could deliver with credibility? As the economist John Maynard Keynes famously said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” We have changed our minds.

Elected as a man of the people, he acts like the rules of the people don’t apply to him. “I’m busy,” says he.
Or claims not to know the rules. Or assigns meanings of convenience to words, such as corruption. To him, calling someone corrupt means that person did not follow proper procedure, not that the person acted dishonestly in return for money or personal gain.

He also said he gained nothing from the unethical fundraising he conducted for his football charity, hitting up lobbyists for donations on city stationary. But he did gain something of value. As a politician, his reputation is his primary asset. His charitable activities, as laudable as they may be, benefit his reputation. Lobbyists paying to buff Ford’s reputation is akin to lobbyists paying to buy him votes.

In Canada’s gold-standard case on crisis management, Maple Leaf Foods CEO Michael McCain said this about seeking help when his cold cuts were killing people: “Going through the crisis there are two advisers I’ve paid no attention to. The first are the lawyers, and the second are the accountants.”

Fast forward to 2012 and it doesn’t seem that Labatt Breweries was paying attention.

The trouble started when the Montreal Gazette posted a picture of Luka Magnotta, the porn actor/model accused of killing and dismembering a student in Montreal, and mailing his severed limbs to various Canadian political parties and elementary schools. In the photo on the Gazette website, Magnotta was holding a bottle of Labatt Blue. Not the kind of publicity you want for your product.

Labatt set its lawyers on the Gazette, who threatened legal action if the picture wasn’t removed.

Any first-year PR professional could have predicted what would happen, and we are willing to bet a free media training session versus a single case of Blue that Labatt’s PR professionals did predict what would happen. But for whatever reason, legal counsel carried the day. The legal threat was made.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of more interesting pictures of Magnotta were floating around but the Blue picture immediately became big news, igniting a viral social media storm that played out for days. It was the threat that launched a thousand tasteless jokes and gruesome Labatt blue slogans.

Labatt took a non-event, gave it huge visibility, and made itself look priggish – exactly the opposite of its desired brand personality – in the process.

Lesson 8: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – Man up, Yunel!

The scouting report on former Toronto Blue Jay shortstop Yunel Escobar: quick-footed, soft hands, strong arm, fertilizer for brains. Escobar wrote an anti-gay slur on the anti-glare black patches he wears under his eyes on the field. That was bad.

The Toronto Blue Jays respond quickly and decisively, slapping him with a three-day suspension and making a strong, unambiguous statement about inclusion in Major League Baseball. The Jays also announced support for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and for the anti-homophobia group You Can Play. That was good.

Then Escobar apologized. That was ugly:
• He did not take responsibility. (“I’m sorry for what happened.”) It didn’t “happen.” You did something. Strike one.
• He did not acknowledge the hurt he caused. (“It’s just something I put on my face as a joke. It was nothing intentionally offensive. I have nothing against homosexuals.”) Strike two.
• And blamed the victims of his slur for feeling insulted. (“I didn’t mean for this to be misinterpreted by the gay community.”) Struck him out!
Tu eres estupido.

Lesson 9: Wherever you are, remember, there you are. Think before you tweet

In today’s highly mobile, globally connected, ready-to feel-slighted world it’s easy to offend. Jann Arden and Robe Lowe found that out this year.

Arden was put off a Via Rail train with her small dog. No dogs allowed, says Via. In a fit of pique, she tweeted unkindly about Via staff, who dropped her in “the middle of nowhere.” The good people of Oshawa don’t consider their hometown “the middle of nowhere” and a brouhaha erupted. We are big Arden fans. She apologized with her characteristic grace, charm and humour. All was forgiven.

Same for Rob Lowe, in Winnipeg to shoot the movie Imperfect Justice. Irked that his local bar wasn’t showing the NBA finals, he tweeted: “The local affiliate is interrupting the 4th quarter of the #NBAFinals to show city council election results!!! #TrappedInAHellHole.”

His tweet became a tempest in a #hellhole. Lowe then said nice things about Winnipeg and claimed he was talking about the bar, not the city, when he made the reference. We agree that any bar not showing the sporting event you want to be watching can legitimately be called a hellhole. All was forgiven.

Lesson 10: Be Yourself or Risk Losing Yourself
Somali-born musician K’naan writes in the New York Times about an elegant fox who coveted the walking style of a prophet. The fox tried to mimic the prophet’s walk but couldn’t. Then he found he had lost his own style. It was a parable about the musician’s attempt to create more commercial music.

“What I am is a fox who wanted to walk like a prophet and now is trying to rediscover its own stride,” the Canadian-Somali artist wrote. “I may never find my old walk again, but I hope someday to see beauty in the graceless limp back toward it.”

There is art and honesty in K’naan’s story. We’ll buy his next album just to see more of that.

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/rob-ford-worst-communicator-of-2012-winners-and-sinners-on-9th-annual-bestworst-list/feed0Helene Campbell needs lung transplantgeoffreyrowanPranksters, bullies cut from the same clothhttp://o.canada.com/news/pranksters-bullies-cut-from-the-same-cloth
http://o.canada.com/news/pranksters-bullies-cut-from-the-same-cloth#commentsWed, 12 Dec 2012 02:36:25 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=166725]]>No one knows what the British nurse Jacintha Saldanha was thinking as she lay dying, either by her own hand or some other as-yet undisclosed cause. But we know exactly what the Australian radio hosts were thinking when they telephoned her nursing station. They were hoping with all their hearts they would be able to embarrass someone and get all of Australia laughing at that person.

Embarrassment is the coin of the realm for pranksters and for a for a few hours the Aussies’ hearts soared when they thought they had embarrassed someone in front of the whole world. They had made their careers. Nuclear-level humiliation.

“Prank” is the benign term we assign to a trick, a deceit that is intended to make people laugh at another’s embarrassment; their misfortune. The Germans have a word for it. Schadenfreude – the pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.

It’s harmless good fun, the pranksters argue. We all get to laugh at the silly fool who fell for the trick. Secretly we all think either that we would be smarter, or we’re thankful that it wasn’t us.

Until it goes too far. Amanda Todd, a Vancouver-area teen, killed herself after she was embarrassed online. Just teen pranks, many probably thought before Amanda killed herself.

How far is too far? If Ms. Saldanha did kill herself in response to the radio prank, it seems like a bizarre overreaction to most rational people. She was tangential in the attempt to ridicule. Not something to kill yourself over.

No, but by any rational standard Ms. Todd’s suicide was also an over-reaction. So her ex-boyfriend posted a photo of her topless online. He’s a jerk. So are the people who tormented her. She’d see that before too long. Couldn’t she see it? Couldn’t she see that a year later, and five, 10, 20, 50 years later, she would have so much more in her life than these embarrassing episodes?

What level of emotional abuse is acceptable? What level of harassment? A topless photo? A career-threatening phone prank?

Of course DJs Mel Greig and Michael Christian had no idea that Ms. Saldanha would kill herself. They thought only of having a good laugh at the expense of whoever picked up the phone. Who could they embarrass?

But pranksters and bullies are cut from the same cloth.

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/pranksters-bullies-cut-from-the-same-cloth/feed0Kate+Nurse+death+Jacintha+SaldanhageoffreyrowanThe Steve-Martin-Brazilian-hooker defence: Can it save Rob Ford, Conrad Black and mankindhttp://o.canada.com/news/national/the-steve-martin-brazilian-hooker-defence-can-it-save-rob-ford-conrad-black-and-mankind
http://o.canada.com/news/national/the-steve-martin-brazilian-hooker-defence-can-it-save-rob-ford-conrad-black-and-mankind#commentsSat, 17 Nov 2012 17:00:25 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=152014]]>Not to be a buzz kill, but this is a reminder that facts matter – reality matters.

Some of us humans show an extraordinary capacity for hubris – for pride and arrogance to the point of losing touch with reality. Not just “losing touch” with it, but dismissing it.

“That’ll be all, reality. Your services here are no longer required.”

Much recent evidence of this new anti-reality has brought this phenomenon into the spotlight. Take my mayor, Rob Ford – please. (Sorry, Henny Youngman.) He seems able to construct different realities around himself with great ease. “That TV reporter was threatening my family … That newspaper reporter was leering at my family … Those 911 operators are bitches … etc. etc.”

The latest is his redefinition of the word “corruption.” He says what it means “to him” is the failure to follow proper process. So, for example, if one were to fail to follow the proper process for lawfully operating a motor vehicle, say by reading while driving, according to Mayor Ford’s definition one could rightfully be called corrupt.

Similarly, if one failed to follow proper process for engaging the use of city-owned buses, one could be called corrupt, using Mayor Ford’s definition.

The rest of the world seems to know the dictionary definition of corruption is acting dishonestly in return for money or personal gain.

In Canada, ignorance of the law is not a valid excuse for committing a crime. It remains to be seen whether ignorance of basic vocabulary by a city’s chief executive officer is an acceptable defence.

But even if the mayor loses the libel case against him, the trend suggests he doesn’t have to kowtow to your pedestrian, catch-all version of reality.

Take Conrad Black, really, pretty please. Mr. Black could be the dictionary picture accompanying hubris. He stands convicted of mail fraud and obstruction of justice. But in his alternate version of reality, he is not a convicted criminal, even though the rest of us understand the definition of convicted criminal is someone who has been convicted of a crime. In his reality, he would not have been convicted for his crimes in Canada or Great Britain, therefore these were not crimes. For many years, pedophiles used the same argument to justify their sex tourism to Asia.

But I am not comparing Conrad Black to a pedophile. His manipulation of reality is more akin to the brilliant Steve Martin defense.

“Let’s say you’re on trial for armed robbery,” explained Mr. Martin many years ago on Saturday Night Live. “You say to the judge, ‘I forgot armed robbery was illegal.’ Let’s suppose he says back to you, ‘You have committed a foul crime. You have stolen hundreds and thousands of dollars from people at random,’ and you say, ‘I forgot’?”

Two simple words: “Excuuuuuse me!!”

Or maybe Mr. Black is using the “Brazilian Virgin” defence. Catarina Migliorini is a 20-year-old Brazilian woman who has agreed to have sex with a man in exchange for $780,000. (This man thinks the sex act is worth $780,000 because Catarina has zero experience having sexual intercourse with a man. BTW, I have zero experience coaching third base for a Major League Baseball team but for half that money I’ll do it for 162 games next season and I guarantee that at least 100 men will score and none of them will get pregnant. Sadly, I also know the players would enjoy the season more with a more experienced coach.)

Anyway, Ms. Migliorini says that her act of trading sex for money is not prostitution because she is only doing it once.

Hmmmm, does that mean we all get one free bank robbery? Embezzlement? Murder?

The thing is, no matter what the people who misrepresent quantum physics want you to believe, there are some facts that we all share. This doesn’t mean one can’t have faith in an afterlife, or in a supreme being, or an order to the universe. It means that while we exist in this reality, we agree to the meaning of words like “corrupt,” “convicted criminal,” “prostitute,” and many others. You don’t get to change the meaning of the word simply because you don’t like what it says about you.

Digression of a public relations professional:

Mr. Black was doing a brilliant job reintegrating with Canadian society until hubris got the better of him. He needed to prove that he could tangle with the aggressive British media better than most. He put on a great show for the Brit-book-buying public, but if his goal is to regain Canadian citizenship, his short-term ego boost may have cost him his ultimate prize, unless he has some inside knowledge that he doesn’t need to follow proper process.)

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/national/the-steve-martin-brazilian-hooker-defence-can-it-save-rob-ford-conrad-black-and-mankind/feed1stevemartin arrowgeoffreyrowanDoes your technology drive you bonkers? Unhealthy relationship with tech support?http://o.canada.com/technology/does-your-technology-drive-you-bonkers-unhealthy-relationship-with-tech-support
http://o.canada.com/technology/does-your-technology-drive-you-bonkers-unhealthy-relationship-with-tech-support#commentsThu, 09 Aug 2012 01:06:40 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=89405]]>They can put a man on the moon, but they can’t make a consumer device that can reliably process 10-billion instructions per second for under $1,000?

No, they can’t. Or if they can, they refuse to.

Imagine this next line in a sarcastic, kind of nasally, whiny voice: “Did you try rebooo-oooting it?” EFF rebooting it! There’s $100-trillion worth of combined R&D leading up to this computing device and the answer to every problem is: “turn it off and then turn it back on and see if that does it.” What if NASA handled problems that way? Or Acme Heart-Lung Machines? Or the security system at a futuristic amusement park where cloned dinosaurs roam free. (OK, well they did have to reboot but why don’t you ask Samuel Jackson how he feels about that reboot.)

And why do I ALWAYS believe there is a fix that doesn’t involve rebooting? I always call the HELP desk and dutifully provide a detailed description of every pre-flaw symptom, behaviour and keystroke.

“I don’t know if this might have anything to do with it, but I sneezed while my hand hovered over a function key.”

“Hmmm, maybe.”

Of course I’m not stupid enough to disrespect an IT professional. That would be like telling your significant other that what she is wearing enhances the appearance of abundance in her caboosal zone. There’s just no percentage in it.

No, my strategy is to be a grateful acolyte — a trusted partner in solving the mystery that is the daily misperformance of my technology. As if I’m an underling on CSI: Silicon Valley.

“So, Gord. We fixed this exact same problem yesterday. What theory are you tracking down today? How can I help?”

“Well, sometimes with these things you get a build-up of old stuff. Kind of electronic gunk.”

“Really? Like in that lethal looking slicer in the deli? My laptop gets a build-up of cold-cut phlegm? Or maybe too much residue from minimum-wage digits?”

“Yeah, kinda.”

“Really, because that makes absolutely no sense. Digital flotsam dirties up my system every day or two, like biscuit crumbs in my keyboard?”

“Well, these systems like to be reset. You know. They like to work from a fresh beginning.”

Holy anthropomorphizing, Batman. Just as I always feared. The electrons flowing through microscopic switches have preferences. They have feelings, wants and desires. It’s not science FICTION at all. “The Soul of The New Machine” was biography, not allegory.

So, maybe my tech foibles are my own spiritual failing and not some maladroit juxtaposition of kibbles and bytes. Perhaps if I only confess my sins, I’ll get a clean slate and can avoid the dreaded reboot.

“Bless me father, for I have sinned. My last confession was about 26 hours ago. I used vulgar language in reference to a digital brother. I had impure thoughts about an input device. I wished a peripheral would burn in the eternal fires of damnation, and I ate a donut while entering data. Please forgive me my sins, and I’ll try to do better next time.”

“Oh, I’ll forgive you,” says the voice of HAL 9000. All computers sound like HAL 9000. “Once you’ve done your penance. Have you tried turning it on and off a few times? That ought to do it.”

It’s a Sunday, of a three-day weekend. In August. We are time-shifted, sleep-deprived and confused as hell from days and nights of Olympic viewing. The mind drifts, wanders and folds in on itself, liberally dosed with sunshine and pinot grigio. And then you come across the New York Times Sunday Book Review and Sarah Bakewell’s analysis of WHY DOES THE WORLD EXIST? An Existential Detective Story, by Jim Holt.

“Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Will you have a little existential angst with that double-double?

I read the New York Times Book Review section because there are many more great books than time to read them. It’s like going into one of those retro candy stores with all the plastic bins, with their little plastic scoops, and tasting 20 or 30 different candies.

In his book, Mr. Holt looks for answers to the question that has at one time or another terrified us all. Why does the New York Times Book Review exist? Or the candy store, or its bins and scoops and candies? Why do we exist? Why does anything exist? What is nothingness?

“Why is there something rather than nothing?”

His best answer came from the British novelist Martin Amis, who told a television interviewer: “We’re at least five Einsteins away from answering that question.”

In other words, our puny brains are not nearly evolved enough yet to comprehend the question, let alone answer it.

Mr. Holt delves into various metaphysical, physical, and spiritual theories. Such as: “the primal nothingness might have been so annihilating that it annihilated itself.”

But that gives nothingness a quality; active properties. Nothingness exists, and therefore it isn’t really nothingness. A thing that affects other things, and itself.

Same with “nothing noths,” which confers on nothingness an activity; a quality of thingness.

Any theory or scenario in which there is a reaction is faulty. Even the concept of nothingness is not nothing because it exists as a concept. That’s what’s really hard to ponder. We can all imagine nothingness as big empty space. But can you imagine it as the absence of big empty space?

In this case, the act of observing nothing means that it is nothing. If there is something to be aware of, something that can be defined, then it is no longer nothing.

The delight here is the sense of purpose this gives us as a species. It’s our job to keep pushing the species forward into the future, however many hundreds of thousands of generations are needed to evolve our cheese curd brains into something sophisticated enough to understand. Right now we’re trying to split atoms with a shovel. Well, some people are using garbage can lids and toothpicks. But it won’t always be thus. A couple of million years from now, if we haven’t blown ourselves up into decidedly non-nothing particles, people will stop to give thanks for all the countless generations of us who didn’t have a clue why anything existed but who nevertheless endured lives of cruelty and pointlessness, dotted with moments of joy, because we had faith there was meaning. Just as I am thankful today for a well-condimented cheeseburger and a backyard hammock.

In my August, long-weekend sloth, I may seem like I am contributing absolutely nothing to family, community, species and planet, but I am doing the most important thing of all. I keep on keeping on. One day your progeny will thank me.

Related articles

]]>http://o.canada.com/life/why-does-anything-exist/feed0Black holegeoffreyrowanSandusky, Magnotta, Williams, Homolka: What is our duty?http://o.canada.com/uncategorized/sandusky-magnotta-williams-homolka-what-is-our-duty
http://o.canada.com/uncategorized/sandusky-magnotta-williams-homolka-what-is-our-duty#commentsSat, 23 Jun 2012 16:23:04 +0000http://blogs.canada.com/?p=63436]]>When I heard about Jerry Sandusky, Luka Magnotta, Russell Williams, Karla Homolka, Paul Bernardo and all the others like them I thought: let’s save everybody a lot of heartache and just one-shot them to the head. Fast and painless. Done. End of threat. Begin the healing.
I’m not sure that’s not the right thing to do when there is incontrovertible evidence, but as I read the reactions to Sandusky’s conviction, the cheers, the Facebook posts pleading for prison house torture, even from some of my most gentle-hearted friends, I think we have come up short of our best selves. That is not going to help us prevent the next Sandusky, Magnotta, Williams et al.
This is not about them. It is about us. It is about our duty of care and loyalty, not to them but to each other; to humanity.
The Sanduskys of the world are broken inside. You cannot rape a child or coldly butcher a lover and have the inner mechanisms that make you part of the continuing family of man. Some species would sniff out that inner damage at birth and ensure the aberration doesn’t pass genetic material on to another generation. As humans, we’re wiser than that. We see the value in all life, and often have the means to care for and love those with even the most severe challenges.
But we can’t tell by looking who is broken inside. There are people among us, who look like us but are not like us. They are not capable of functioning in a way that honors their duty of care and loyalty to the rest of us. If the people whose inner damage puts them on the path to evil were within the range of intact human beings, then we could not survive as a species.
That’s where it falls to the rest of us. Mike McCreary, the late Joe Paterno, and by various reports at least two other Penn State officials, failed in their duty of care and loyalty to the human race. They knew about a threat to defenseless children and they did not do everything in their power to stop it. McCreary reported the rape he saw to Paterno, but that did not end the threat, and he knew that.
We cannot outsource the duty of care and loyalty we have for our species, (or for our planet.) It’s not enough to say: “I told so-and-so that a child was at risk. I did my part.” If the child is still at risk, you haven’t done your part.
This seems to be what the Occupier Movement is saying, but it is so bad at saying it that it’s impossible to know. Ironically, the duties of care and loyalty are from the corporate world. They are the primary duties of governance that corporate directors must uphold, or they must resign. Each individual. It is a personal duty.
Care and loyalty are also the primary duties we have to each other as humans. There will be broken people. Sometimes the break will be reparable. Just about any mental illness can be treated. But we each have a responsibility to each other. If we are to survive as a species, we must each honor our personal duty of care and responsibility to each other. We are, in fact, our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper]]>http://o.canada.com/uncategorized/sandusky-magnotta-williams-homolka-what-is-our-duty/feed0Jury Deliberates In Sandusky Child Molestion TrialgeoffreyrowanMarketing: Why did you really buy those shoes or marry that person? The Homophily Principlehttp://o.canada.com/news/marketing-why-did-you-really-buy-those-shoes-and-that-ipad-or-marry-that-person-homophily-principle
http://o.canada.com/news/marketing-why-did-you-really-buy-those-shoes-and-that-ipad-or-marry-that-person-homophily-principle#commentsWed, 30 May 2012 00:22:49 +0000http://blogs.canada.com/?p=57214]]>(With files from Charlotte Haigh)

Homophily is not a gay bleeding disorder. It’s a principle that explains why people will stand in line over night to buy stuff, or how we choose who we’ll marry, or hire, or hang out with.

It’s also a boot in the pants to the people (like me) whose day job is helping companies sell stuff, whether that’s ideas, strategies or cottage cheese.

Once again, it seems the wisdom of grandma shines through. Homophily means “love of the same” or roughly “birds of a feather flock together.” Forget “opposites attract.” Many studies, including this one, show that we are hard-wired to seek others like us. We look for sameness in race, age, religion, education, occupation and gender. It explains why married couples often look alike, and why so many companies and boards of directors are so lacking in diversity.

People don’t want to be different. We long to fit in, and will go out of our way to find the crowd we fit with best. Teenaged girls in Uggs. Teenaged boys with pants sagging under their butts. Goths in goth uniforms and preppies in preppie uniforms.

The Homophily Principle means you are most likely to choose partners, friends and employees who look a lot like you, and who share your tastes and values. It’s the way our brains work. We are the person we know best and we trust what we know. We don’t need to review, test or validate what we already know. We process it more quickly, like data that’s stored in our computer’s memory cache rather than on the hard drive. Too esoteric? We accept the easy stuff first. (“Hey, that guy’s just like me, and I’m good.”)

Homophily explains why some people watch Fox. And some watch CBC. It explains why most people rarely consume media that challenges their own beliefs. (“Those people are whackos. Not like me. They have zero credibility.”)

It’s insidious when it affects hiring or other situations where equal opportunity is a right. It takes a conscious effort to overcome it, and even then it’s still fairly pervasive.

But it’s a useful insight when it affects commerce or persuasive communication. For example, I am just like you in every way. I’m your age, work the same kind of job as you, and we share the same upbringing, hopes and dreams. Do you believe me now?

This is mostly how bias works—not as conscious discrimination but as a built-in preference for what we know without questioning. It is why, despite all the money spent on diversity training, executive suites and boards of directors are still overwhelmingly made up of white men, and perhaps why the PR industry comprises mostly women.

In one way he has stood a fundamental marketing/persuasion principle on its head. Create buzz and excitement for a product and people will go crazy to buy it. No, but show us that people like us are going crazy for something, and chances are we’ll want it too.

But in another way Homophily confirms the ages-old principle of branding. People buy something because of the way it makes them feel about themselves. I buy a certain car or article of clothing because it makes me feel that I am the kind of person who would own that car or piece of clothing. And I know that because the people I see driving that car or wearing that piece of clothing look like what I think I look like. (A sophisticated man of the world, if you’re taking notes.)

And you thought you bought those shoes because they were cute.

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/marketing-why-did-you-really-buy-those-shoes-and-that-ipad-or-marry-that-person-homophily-principle/feed0Johnny Depp and Vanessa ParadisgeoffreyrowanIf deadly mistakes happened as often at Leafs games as in Canadian hospitals, would you still go?http://o.canada.com/news/if-deadly-mistakes-happened-as-often-at-leafs-games-as-in-canadian-hospitals-would-you-still-go
http://o.canada.com/news/if-deadly-mistakes-happened-as-often-at-leafs-games-as-in-canadian-hospitals-would-you-still-go#commentsMon, 28 May 2012 18:55:49 +0000http://blogs.canada.com/?p=56890]]>Sure, they’re maddening to watch, but nearly 20,000 of us go to every Toronto Maple Leafs home game. But would you go if you knew that at every game, three spectators would die because of some operational screw up? Maybe the rink crew forgets to put up a section of protective glass, or maybe your nachos get sprinkled with a lethal dose of rat poison.

Would you be willing to board any plane in Canada if you knew that every week, 462 people would die in plane crashes caused by pilot error, or ground crew error, or flight attendant error, or air traffic error? Maybe one big airliner, or 10 small ones. How would that play on your mom’s flying jitters? How would you feel about putting your son or daughter on a flight back to school or off to visit cool Aunt Ruth?

You play that game of roulette every time you seek treatment at a Canadian hospital. Of course if we were dying in these numbers at Leafs games – real death, with all of its agonizing consequences, broken-hearted family and friends – the arena would be shut down after two or three games. If planes were falling out of the sky that often, with horrified family members lining up at airports to learn the fate of their loved ones, civil aviation in this country would be shut down.

But on average in Canada, 66 people die every day from preventable mistakes made in hospitals. That’s 24,000 people dying every year from mistakes, and many, many more being made sicker for longer, or having their quality of life permanently diminished because of preventable errors. One highly credible study estimates that 7.5% of Canadians admitted to hospitals each year experience at least one error. In total, those errors are responsible for more than a million extra days spent in medical facilities, and 66 deaths every day.

It’s inescapable that in any system relying on human beings, there will be mistakes. Hospitals are no different, except that their mistakes often have consequences much graver than having the wrong beer delivered to your seat. They work very hard to avoid mistakes but with billions of patient interactions, stuff happens.

Here’s the important news. We could cut the death count in half if Canada and the provinces would stop dawdling, playing parochial power/ego games and accelerate the roll-out of electronic health records.

It may surprise many Canadians to know that Canada does not have a national health care system. It has 13 provincial systems, and little or no incentive for those 13 systems to cooperate with each other.

But we also have Canada Health Infoway, a visionary federal program that works with provinces and territories to implement electronic health records that result in better, safer care for all of us – shorter wait times, faster lab results, better diagnoses, and billions of dollars saved. E-health records also result in fewer errors, reducing the human toll and the economic burden rom those million extra patient days. Probably also reducing law suits from wrongful deaths and injuries.

Unfortunately, Canada Health Infoway and its underlying goal of enabling health care providers wherever they are to have clear, accurate and complete information about their patients, has come under attack by the penny-wise, pound-foolish set. It costs a lot of money to upgrade an outdated system that doesn’t deliver what Canadians want it to deliver. But in a climate where we think it’s wise to elect Rob Ford to derail the gravy train, well, we’ve kind of lost our minds a little.

We are engaged in a collective exercise of magic thinking. We want what we want when we want it, and we don’t want to pay for it.

We want plentiful energy for less than it costs to produce and we don’t want it to pollute. We want tuition rates at unsustainable levels because as one protestor said: “A university education is our right as Canadians.” (See Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It’s not.)

And more than anything, we want the very best health care money can buy when we are in need – and everybody will be in need – but we don’t want to pay for it.

It’s time to remove our magic-thinking caps and make some decisions. Oh, and how about taking a little personal responsibility?

The more we are involved in managing our own health, in being a partner to our health care providers, the better our health will be, for longer. Canada is already evolving to a system of more out-patient care, and more chronic care rather than acute care. We are going to see more health care professionals, more specialists. We are more mobile as a society, which means we will see more health care professionals in more locations. And we have more sophisticated care options available to us, which can enable us to enjoy longer, healthier lives.

It would be head-in-the-sand foolish to say that we aren’t going to upgrade our health care system to be more efficient and effective because it’s going to be expensive. Health care accounts for about 40 per cent of all provincial and territorial spending – more than $200-billion in 2011. That number will only continue to increase. The question is, can we take steps to get the most out of our health care spend? Can we be smarter, and make fewer mistakes that harm or kill people?

Finally, in the spirit of taking more responsibility for our own care and giving health care professionals the information they need to provide us with the best care, there is an option we can adopt on our own.

The 51-year-old not-for-profit Canadian MedicAlert Foundation can be thought of as the original e-health record. (DISCLOSURE: I’m a volunteer member of the CMAF board of directors.) People tend to know it as “the bracelet company,” but what most don’t realize is behind that bracelet, necklace or other piece of jewelry is a medical record that can provide health care practitioners with vital information about patients who can’t speak for themselves. First responders are trained to look for MedicAlert ID and call the 24-hour hotline for access to the individual’s record. It saves lives and prevents mistakes.

The point is whether it’s telling your MPP you want e-health records, or getting a MedicAlert record, or both, Canadians will be – and must be – more involved in our own care and in ensuring going to a hospital is not going to have as bad an outcome as going to a Leafs game.

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/if-deadly-mistakes-happened-as-often-at-leafs-games-as-in-canadian-hospitals-would-you-still-go/feed0emergency-room-1geoffreyrowanConrad Black: a Fredo Corleone for our timeshttp://o.canada.com/uncategorized/conrad-black-a-fredo-corleone-for-our-times
http://o.canada.com/uncategorized/conrad-black-a-fredo-corleone-for-our-times#commentsFri, 18 May 2012 15:06:16 +0000http://blogs.canada.com/?p=54559]]>I believe Conrad Black when he says he did not ask the Harper government for help getting back into Canada, though in his typical style of self-aggrandizement he makes sure everyone knows he could have phoned the prime minister and other senior members of government. It would have been an uncomfortable call for everyone involved. Awkward.

That’s because Black has become the Fredo Corleone of our times – the guy who embarrasses Godfather Michael Corleone by his behaviour but is mostly tolerated because, well, what else would you do with him?

Like Fredo, Black has a history of stupid decisions made to fuel his apparent desire for recognition and respect. He renounced his Canadian citizenship for a largely meaningless British title – Baron Black of Crossharbour. Besides being a slap in the face to all Canadians who think it is a greater honour to be a Canadian citizen than to sit in the House of Lords, that decision has turned out to be problematic.

The Godfather always knew that if one was going to engage in criminal activities, one needed all the friends one could have.

Black was convicted of fraud, and obstruction of justice. Let’s go to the tape on that one.

He insists the contents of the boxes were his personal effects. He probably did a cost-benefit analysis on their removal. (Do I suffer more by leaving them or taking them.) But Black also has a history of being a bit fuzzy on who owns what, as in the early 1980s when his Argus Corp. grabbed millions from the Dominion Stores workers’ pension fund, claiming the surplus belonged to the company. The Supreme Court of Ontario disagreed.

Like poor old hungry-for-respect-Fredo, even the most kind-hearted and loyal wish Black would just sink into anonymity.

But don’t bet on it.

“It ain’t the way I wanted it! I can handle things! I’m smart! Not like everybody says… like dumb… I’m smart and I want respect!”

]]>http://o.canada.com/uncategorized/conrad-black-a-fredo-corleone-for-our-times/feed0Fredo_CorleonegeoffreyrowanAmerica’s Got Talent proves Howard Stern is a role model, for leadershttp://o.canada.com/news/americas-got-talent-proves-howard-stern-is-a-role-model-for-leaders
http://o.canada.com/news/americas-got-talent-proves-howard-stern-is-a-role-model-for-leaders#commentsMon, 14 May 2012 14:50:54 +0000http://blogs.canada.com/?p=53177]]>Howard Stern has created billions for the entertainment industry, and as the newest judge on America’s Got Talent he proves he can adapt when opportunities arise. His career, including this dip into the mainstream, personifies the text-book traits of great leadership. The man who once pretended to run for governor of New York is in fact a leader for our times.

Stern, disparaged by the religious right and reviled by many as a “shock jock,” is adored by legions of fans as the King of All Media. He was hired by America’s Got Talent because its producers believe he can expand the success of an already enormously successful franchise. It was a smart move. He is a success by just about every measure and has created success for those around him.

If his empire was built on office supplies rather than edgy entertainment his leadership style would be studied at Harvard, INSEAD, the London School of Economics and all the world’s great business schools. It would be a must-read case study in the Harvard Business Review, mandatory for every executive education program.

Even this latest foray is classic leadership.

“Many people get into big leadership roles and they can’t let go of what they’ve done in the past,” said Dr. Linda Sharkey. “They don’t learn the art and science of what it takes to lead organizations and their people to greatness.”

Who is Dr. Sharkey? She is widely held to be one of the top leadership coaches and consultants in the world. The iconic business leader Jack Welch embraced her practices for GE’s leadership factory. Recently named Global Managing Partner of ACHIEVEBLUE Corp., the Toronto-based talent and leadership development consultancy, she wasn’t speaking specifically about Stern but was asked about the most important characteristics of great leaders.

“Every leader needs to know that they are the vehicle of leadership,” she said. “The only way you can continue to grow as a leader is to continue to understand yourself and how you affect others. How self-aware are you? How much do you know about yourself?”

Stern knows himself better than most leaders. He fearlessly acknowledges spending three sessions a week with his psychotherapist to ensure that. What political or business leader would do as much? He also excels in many other leadership requirements.

Vision

His vision is clear, concise, and easy to understand. He communicates it often and he measures his performance constantly. It is to always be entertaining, “the king of all media.” He has had best-selling books, a box-office hit movie, a top-performing radio show (broadcast and satellite) for decades, cable TV success and now a $20-million-a-year contract with America’s Got Talent.

Loyalty

Stern only took the AGT job after they agreed to move the show from LA to New York so he could continue to do his radio show, for fans and his colleagues. He has navigated the notoriously treacherous egos, politics and business practices of the entertainment industry for decades, all while maintaining his core team, and in many cases elevating their abilities beyond any level they could have achieved on their own. He recognizes where team chemistry creates a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Supporting cast member Robin Quivers, for example, was a local market radio news reader. She lacks comedic talent but she was an early supporter and part of an ensemble that evolves over time but remains recognizable.

Stern’s loyalty seems personal and genuine, even when it’s difficult and possibly risky. He worked with comedian Artie Lange through Lange’s many lapses into substance abuse, and a suicide attempt. He suffered through the abuses of mediocre comedian Jackie Martling, who seemed to be constantly trading off his connection to Stern, sometimes at risk to Stern’s own brand.

But Howard’s most important loyalties are for his audience. He has never betrayed the core following whose support has been the foundation of his success. Forays into other media have always been built around his offering to his core audience. His brand extensions (into other media) always provide additional value to his base rather than depleting them.

The result is that Stern has a legion of brand ambassadors who are out in the world every day, promoting the Stern brand online, through prank phone calls to call in shows, or in water-cooler conversations at the office.

Honest feedback, accountability

His loyalty isn’t blind. Listeners to his radio show know that Stern gives tough, in-the-moment, and very specific feedback to his people when their performance does not meet the standards expected. That feedback is always in service of providing the best entertainment experience for his audience. He will become the one judge on America’s Got Talent that every performer wants to impress because they know he will give honest feedback.

Innovation

Stern is an innovation engine. He created the so-called shock-jock genre. His version stands alone as a sophisticated and constantly improving iteration, head and shoulders above pale imitations. He pushes the boundaries of entertainment, whether with content – Crackhead Bob, the late Hank the Angry Dwarf, Eric the Midget et al – or technology, such as the Sybaran female masturbation saddle or Real Doll sex mannequins. But his biggest innovation, and risk, was the move into satellite radio.

He is slow to tamper with the core value proposition for his consumers, but is aggressive and demanding in seeking new ways to present and build on that value.

Risk

A leader decides what to do and what not to do. Throughout his career, Stern has made tough decisions always in support of his strategic vision. He has pushed boundaries past the breaking point, and as a result has been fired several times. He made the risky transition into satellite radio, knowing that it would mean some lost audience but betting that the value to his most loyal consumers would outweigh the loss of less loyal followers. He bet his brand on that move and it made him one of the most successful entertainment properties in the world.

Confidence, with a willingness to admit weakness

One does not declare oneself “the king of all media” without a significant measure of either self-delusion or self-confidence. Stern has a track record of delivering. Those around him know that if he says he is going to achieve a goal, he will very likely achieve it. But his self-confidence is not pure egotism. He holds himself accountable to the same high standards he demands of others, and he willingly mocks his own perceived shortcomings, whether that’s penis size, a shopping list of neuroses, or a temporarily raspy voice from a head-cold or a late night.

Authenticity and Integrity

There is a mistaken perception that charisma is a significant leadership quality. Leaders may or may not have personal magnetism. Stern may or may not. That is a highly subjective judgment. More important qualities for effective leaders are authenticity and integrity.

Stern’s most powerful asset is that for his audience, he seems to have erased the line between his entertainment character and his real self. He is authentic, believable. He lives in a $60-million Manhattan apartment with panoramic views of Central Park and is married to a supermodel, but his audience sees him as a man of the people because he lives by the values his character talks about every day.

There is a mistaken perception that integrity is synonymous with sobriety and conservative sexual and social mores. It is not. Integrity is the quality of living by the values you espouse – of doing what you say. Stern has courageous honesty. For that reason, he will never win over a segment of society with different beliefs.

Leaders get in trouble when there is a gap between what they say and what they do. Stern has built his media empire with no significant scandal, but countless charismatic business, political and religious leaders have destroyed themselves by falling into the huge chasm between what they say and what they do.

Curiosity

Stern is child-like in his curiosity, whether it’s learning karate, chess, photography, or understanding the sex drive of lesbians. Curiosity keeps him fresh. It activates other parts of his brain, enabling him to approach issues from creative and ever-changing perspectives. It feeds his hunger for the continuous improvement.

Obsessive

A great leader almost has to be neurotic. He or she must obsess about quality, about competition, and about new opportunities. Is the leader getting the best out of individuals, teams, processes and tools? Where is the weakness? How can it be addressed? Stern plays out his neuroses in front of millions of people every day.

When you strip away the content of Stern’s media empire – which some find too uncomfortable to deal with, or morally reprehensible – what’s left are the values and behaviors of excellent leadership.

Stern has earned the leadership title King of All Media.

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/americas-got-talent-proves-howard-stern-is-a-role-model-for-leaders/feed0Howard AGTgeoffreyrowanTime Magazine’s Mother’s Day war on the breast threatens Earth, Milky Wayhttp://o.canada.com/news/time-magazines-mothers-day-war-on-the-breast-threatens-earth-milky-way
http://o.canada.com/news/time-magazines-mothers-day-war-on-the-breast-threatens-earth-milky-way#commentsSat, 12 May 2012 20:40:29 +0000http://blogs.canada.com/?p=53081]]>Men think about sex every seven seconds. It will be impossible to maintain that level of committed focus if the radical movement to desexualize the breast is successful. The world as we know it will cease to exist.

Warriors of the utilitarian breast movement argue that breasts exist to nourish our offspring. Well, sure. The three-year-old lad at his mother’s breast in the Time Magazine cover photo looks like he’s standing at the soft drink dispenser at McDonald’s. (He also looks a lot like one of my freshmen dorm mates at a keg party. Bruno?) But is that all women are meant to be? Kid filling stations? No. We left the state of nature. We came down from the trees and moved into cities where we have night clubs and condo swimming pools. Limiting women to the role of lactose pumps at all-night tiny-tots keggers is short-sighted.

Sexual titillation plays an important role in society, and we diminish it at our own peril as a species. Consider what happened when we desexualized other things. A glimpse of the female ankle was once scandalous. Then the radical Ankles-Are-For-Standing Brigade got a pen-and-ink drawing onto the cover of Before Time Magazine showing a woman standing upright, on her own two feet, clearly supported by two sturdy ankles. In less than a generation the ankle lost its power to titillate. Now women have no excuse when their boyfriends suggest they go jogging together, though some have tried the old breast-pain gambit. It works when breasts are sexual, but if they’re just another wobbly bit of flesh, run through the pain, pal. Run through the pain.

A more frightening example of desexualization is the male body. It has been completely desexualized. Ask any wife. The result of that? The mesh t-shirt and banana hammock bathing suit. Guys just quit trying, except for gay men. No gay male sexual activity is in any way related to procreation or child rearing, and who seems to be having more fun than gay men?

The jury is still out on the desexualization of pubic hair. Once upon a time the pube-fro was a thing to behold. But the pulchritudinous pompadour has fallen out of favour, replaced by the chrome dome. On the one hand, the boon in wax production has cost men an important navigational tool – the PPS, or Pubic Positioning System – that helped countless generations get where they needed to go in the dark. Some may scoff at this, but did you never wonder why women started shaving their armpits many decades ago? “No, not there, Fred. Lower.” Did you think it coincidence that the Baby Boom immediately followed the introduction of armpit shaving? (The exceptions that prove the rule are French women, many of whom don’t shave their armpits. French men are simply more adept at l’amour than the rest of us.)

On the other hand, the absence of curly ground cover may help men better familiarize themselves with the underlying terrain, for the benefit of all. But don’t get your hopes up. Women are anatomical mysteries to men. Most of us could find Ursa Minor faster than we could find a latin-named lady bit. And new ones are always being discovered. The G-Spot. The T-Zone. The M-Ruffle. The Norwegian Triangle. The Winnebago. They’re probably just making some of this stuff up. But still, all the more reason to retain a sexual view of the breast. Everybody needs a base camp, a safe home. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows the name.

Many women lament the role of the breast in society’s destructive beauty myth, arguing that the beauty industry has created an unrealistic ideal of the female body – huge rack, tiny waist. But this beauty myth is a myth. Men sexualize all breasts. Big, small, pert, jumbly, symmetrical, lopsided, young and old, they’re all intriguing. The attraction that many men have to large breasts is practical rather than aesthetic. The bigger the target, the better the chance that we will be able to find an erogenous zone. (See above: the anatomical mystery that is woman.)

Then there’s the economic impact and cultural impact of a boobs-are-boring world view. Game of Thrones would become an incomprehensible show about guys chopping each other’s heads off. Women’s Beach Volley Ball would never be televised. In fact, most existing television programming would never be televised. The motion picture industry would collapse. And the video gaming industry. And the plastic surgery industry. And the fashion industry. The Oscar telecast would lose three-quarters of its ratings and its post-Oscar buzz. The term “wardrobe malfunction” would be retired. The tube top never invented.

Women’s breasts have nourished mankind throughout our entire history. They have enabled a species and all that it has created or ever will create. Men think about sex every seven seconds. We’re both doing our part. Seems like a don’t-fix-what-ain’t-broken situation.

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/time-magazines-mothers-day-war-on-the-breast-threatens-earth-milky-way/feed0time covergeoffreyrowanBitter about litter. Cigarette butt flickers, it’s not OKhttp://o.canada.com/news/butt-flickers-message-to-us-do-anything-you-want-with-her-just-no-rough-stuff
http://o.canada.com/news/butt-flickers-message-to-us-do-anything-you-want-with-her-just-no-rough-stuff#commentsThu, 10 May 2012 19:09:28 +0000http://blogs.canada.com/?p=52678]]>There’s been some great cigarette flicking in the movies – butt disposal as a show of absolute disdain, disrespect, revulsion and degradation for the target.

Remember Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, confronting Sport the pimp (Harvey Keitel)?

Bickle, fully embracing his inner vigilante, shaves his head into a so-called Mohawk style, and starts badgering Sport about the 12-year-old girl (played by Jodie Foster) he is pimping.

Sport: Hey, go back to your f***n’ tribe before you get hurt, huh man. Do me a favor, I don’t want no trouble, huh. Okay?

Bickle: You got a gun?

Sport: Get the f*** outta here, man.

[Flicks his cigarette at him]

Great film, great acting, great scene. That’s the movies. In real life, I see people flicking cigarettes every day; into the street, the sidewalk, the park, out their car windows, onto beaches, into fountains, lakes, or wherever they happen to be when they’ve taken that last drag.

So what makes it OK to toss your burning, lip-juiced, tar-soaked garbage into the world we all have to live in?

As a former smoker, I know the excuses. It’s just a tiny cigarette butt. I want to keep my ashtray clean. I don’t want to have to carry this thing until I find a place to dump it properly. It doesn’t matter. Everybody does it.

The first problem is that a lot of people do do it. Conservative estimates are that 2 billion non-biodegradable cigarette butts rain down on the planet every day. By some estimates as much as 40 per cent of litter is related to cigarettes – either butts or the packaging. A lot of smokers think it’s OK to remove the cellophane wrapping from a new pack of smokes and set it free. Or to do the frustrated empty-pack-crumple-and-drop: “This pack is empty. It’s no use to me anymore. Get out of my life.”

My father, raised in Saskatchewan, was taught never to throw a cigarette butt from a car because of the risk of fire to forests and crops. He filled his car ashtray until it overflowed and then he’d pull into the parking lot of a supermarket or fast-food restaurant and empty it on the ground.

The second, bigger problem is that the ubiquitous butt flick promotes the idea that it is OK to just toss your refuse anywhere. It’s OK to give the finger to the world, presumably because you are so hard done by the world that it deserves the Bickle treatment — a show of absolute and utter disdain, disrespect, revulsion and degradation.

Littering is cynical and lazy. It’s an attitude that recalls another powerful scene from Taxi Driver, when Sport is telling Bickle all the ways he can sexually abuse a child.

“You can do anything you want with her. You can … [he lists four or five obscene and illegal-with-a-child acts before concluding] … But no rough stuff, all right?”

Painfully brilliant writing. So you can spill your waste wherever you want, but no rough stuff.

Litter is a small word that we have trivialized, but it reflects one of the most important values any of us can bring to our community: personal responsibility. We are each responsible for creating and maintaining the community in which we live.

Tossing your juice jar or half-eaten falafel onto the floor of the subway is showing blatant disregard for your community, and a complete abrogation of personal responsibility. It says: “I’m done with this space. F*** you. Let someone else take care of it if you want it nice.”

Litter is not only cynical and lazy. It is angry, ignorant and self-defeating.

Taxi Driver was set in New York in the heart of the gritty, cynical ’70s. It was a modern-day Gomorrah. Ironically, in the years that followed, New York cleaned itself up while at the same time many Torontonians became embarrassed that our city was known as a clean and safe New York. What did we hear? Toronto is not as cool as New York. Not as tough and gritty.

So our response has been to dirty it up. Someone else will clean up. Not my problem.

Yes, the individual act of flicking a cigarette butt onto the ground is a small one in the grander scheme of things. But look at the position of your finger after you have flicked. That’s the message you are sending to your family, friends, neighbours, community and the planet.

You might also consider what Travis Bickle did to Sport after Sport flicked his cigarette.

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/butt-flickers-message-to-us-do-anything-you-want-with-her-just-no-rough-stuff/feed0De Niro movies.ign.comgeoffreyrowanA simpler life? Not with today’s technologyhttp://o.canada.com/news/a-simpler-life-not-with-todays-technology
http://o.canada.com/news/a-simpler-life-not-with-todays-technology#commentsWed, 09 May 2012 15:09:54 +0000http://blogs.canada.com/?p=52144]]>What’s wrong with this picture? A spectacularly pregnant woman parks her oversized white SUV curbside on a city street, rappels down to the sidewalk and hikes the better part of a block through cold, blowing sleet to the nearest parking meter. Trying to shield her face against the icy pellets with her Louis Vuitton wallet, she plunks a shiny loonie into the meter but it doesn’t take. It’s a new loonie, too light to satisfy the soulless machine. With numb fingers, slush trickling from her windward ear down her neck into a chilly pool behind her clavicle, she pulls a credit card from the wallet, slides it into the machine, pokes the buttons, and waits. And waits. And waits.

I will never know the discomforts of being gloriously, magnificently, watermelonly with child, but I know enough to appreciate and respect women every day of the year (not just Mothers’ Day) for their gift to humanity. I’m guessing that wind, ice, cold and treacherous footing do not enhance the gestational experience. And knowing that while you’re trying to ensure the survival of the species, you must endure all this additional discomfort so a parking meter can phone your bank to check your credit rating and authorize a $1 charge, well please, bring on that sweet, sweet epidural. Pump it right into my brain.

When exactly did we begin living our lives in service of our technology? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around? Isn’t technology supposed to make our lives easier?

My Ketchum colleagues surveyed 6,000 consumers recently and fully 76 per cent of us say that’s not happening for us. We’re not satisfied with technology’s ability to make our lives simpler, according to the global Ketchum Digital Living Index. That’s not a few Luddites. That’s more than three-quarters of us giving technology a #fail.

I get it. It takes a minimum of two remote controls to turn on my TV and three if I want sound. How is that easier?

Our fireplace also operates only by remote control but that controller is so incomprehensible that we usually just use the three basic TV controllers to watch the Fireplace Channel. I think that uses less gas.

Is “reply all” a net benefit to the planet? Or autocorrect when texting? I spend more time in a day trying to correct predictive text and unformat predictive formatting than I do in conversation with my children.

My work computer was recently upgraded to Windows 7, removing or at least hiding really well several functions that I grew dependent on. In other cases, functions that were one or two clicks away are now four or five clicks away.

The complexification of life – in the guise of labour saving – is everywhere. Why does my car randomly lock itself at the most inconvenient moments? What kind of intuition must I acquire to know which combinations of the four different buttons, levers, sliders and pressure panels I must execute in what order to reset the clock on my digital alarm? Clock radios have existed for nearly 4,000 years. Why do I need one with a button for Daylight Savings Time in Kuwait, but no buttons for hours or minutes?

Why does my garage door respond to the keypad code some days while other days it pretends to sleep contentedly, its garagey arms wrapped around all my good garage stuff?

Why must I accompany waiters back to their wait stations to pay my bill in some restaurants because they haven’t ponied up for the table-side chip-card readers?

Why do I need an alphanumeric password (no spaces or symbols) to open my toothpaste in the morning, and a different one for a length of floss? Why do any of us need this additional work and complexity?

The answer, of course, is that we do not need or want a lot of it. But technologists insist they will be served. They tell the city how much money will be saved by installing credit-card capable parking meters. (It’s pure gravy to allow a meter for every space.) Sounds like a good idea, to make the city’s life easier. Then you start to see the unintended consequences – the pregnant lady in the ice storm.

The Ketchum study has all kinds of great insights about how people use technology, or want to use technology. And lots of great advice for technology companies to market their products. They even hired a cultural anthropologist, Emma Gilding, to design the study and analyze the results. She found profound differences in how we use and feel about technology from country to country. The French want to create experiences. In China, people expect technology to help them manage relationships and health. For Americans, it can be a way to signal who you are.

But for me and the pregnant lady in the blowing sleet, the best insight from the research was this: “Don’t ignore the elephant in the room – simplification.” (Sorry, that was not a crack about the pregnant lady’s size.)

I love technology. I continue to hope against all the odds that it will save us from ourselves. (Yes, I’m a Trekkie.) But we want our technology to enable us to do something we weren’t able to do before. ( I’m still waiting for my personal jet-pack.) Or we want it to improve on something we like to do now. (iPods and home-delivery pizza come to mind as success stories.) Simplification means getting technology out of the way. The more we must encounter technology in our lives, the greater the need to make those encounters painless – or even enjoyable.

So how about installing some climate-controlled parking meters, with soft drink dispensers and high-definition screens tuned to the Fireplace Channel (or the Aquarium Channel in summer), so you can watch something while you’re waiting for your credit approval?

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/a-simpler-life-not-with-todays-technology/feed0pregnant woman bathing herself with buckets of water dr heckle funny photo bloggeoffreyrowanOccupy protestors to the world’s poor: ‘Let them eat yoga’http://o.canada.com/news/occupy-protestors-to-the-worlds-poor-let-them-eat-yoga
http://o.canada.com/news/occupy-protestors-to-the-worlds-poor-let-them-eat-yoga#commentsWed, 02 May 2012 17:27:21 +0000http://blogs.canada.com/?p=50506]]>No argument here. Mining is a big, dirty, ugly business and yoga is beautiful, gentle and mindful. But while protesting the mining industry at Barrick Gold’s annual meeting, the Occupy protesters might dip a toe into the real world long enough to look past esthetics to activity that really helps people they claim to represent.

First, consider our own working stiffs — Canadian men and women who grind out a living every day, trying to live a life, raise a family, find their own meaning on the planet, and build a nest egg so that one day when they choose to or are no longer able to work, they will have a measure of financial security.

Many of those men and women tuck a little of their earnings away into mutual funds, or perhaps they are part of a bigger group like the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan or the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. Those funds invest money in companies like Barrick, hoping that one day the investment and a little more will be returned, in exchange for letting the company use its money.

Then a company like Barrick uses that investor money to develop a big, complicated, expensive and risky project to produce something that the world needs or wants.

This is where you have to do your downward-dog versus cyanide-leach-pit calculation. Minerals tend to be located in the earth. Access to minerals often requires moving large amounts of that earth. The esthetics of mining are awful.

Here in in the developed worldwe have the luxury of placing a high value on esthetics, and romanticizing lifestyles that we have never lived. We look at a photo of a Chinese farmer standing in a beautiful, green rice paddy and think, “Wow, that’s so pretty. What a magnificent, simple life.”

Meanwhile, the Chinese rice farmer is thinking: “God, I hate this. My back is killing me. I’ve got foot rot from standing in this muck every day. It’s a million degrees out here. Damn bugs eating me alive. Snakes all over the place. Rice and tea for every meal, when I’m lucky. Teeth falling out. What’s a sick day? What’s a holiday? What’s retirement? How do I get me one of those factory jobs in the city?”

In most of the places mining companies go, real life is even bleaker. People will risk anything for a job and for the economic benefits that industry brings. When you’re trying to scratch out a living in a shack in the jungle, when your life expectancy is maybe 30, the “noble savage” mythology would be laughable if it weren’t so ignorant and offensive.

None of that excuses the harmful exploitation of people anywhere on the planet. And in the big, ugly, messy world of industry, some people have taken short-cuts and done evil things. That is not acceptable. Everybody and every organization needs to be accountable. But on balance, when Canadian companies do business around the world, even in the most difficult places in the world, they bring Canadian values with them. Barrick certainly does.

The notion that big and ugly equals evil is elitist and harmful. When camping out is an option for everybody in the developing world and not a fact of life, maybe then you can start placing a prettiness ratio on the kind of economic activity that lifts people out of stone-age poverty and all the social ills that go with it.

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/occupy-protestors-to-the-worlds-poor-let-them-eat-yoga/feed0Gold mininggeoffreyrowanQuebec students master the ‘I-Got-Mine’ lessonhttp://o.canada.com/news/quebec-students-master-the-i-got-mine-lesson
http://o.canada.com/news/quebec-students-master-the-i-got-mine-lesson#commentsTue, 01 May 2012 19:25:46 +0000http://blogs.canada.com/?p=50295]]>They have learned it well, our protesting Quebecuniversity students. They have learned the most unCanadian of lessons, except that it’s not really unCanadian at all. They have learned how to jump the queue, how to promote their own interests above the interests of all others. They have learned how to vote their pocketbook.

This must be how the master pickpocket feels when his child commits its first successful dip: a sense of pride, and recognition that junior is on the same path of dubious accomplishment that we have worn down so fruitfully. The path of “I got mine.”

It would be stupid to argue against the creation of a system of post-secondary education that would provide every student the time and resources to earn a quality education, regardless of their socio-economic standing. Education is good, for individuals and society.

So the issue is one values, of prioritization, of choice. Food is also good for individuals and society. So is health care, and social assistance, and pension funding, and transportation, and art, and national defence, and governance. So are a thousand other things, including discretionary spending once your tax bill is paid.

The question then, is how do we as a society determine our priorities? Whoever screams the loudest? Is underwriting a first-rate education for the next generation a good priority? Probably. So, from whom do you take that money?

The blogger and author Mike Spry has argued that the protestors don’t want free tuition. “… what they really want is accountability. They want the state to make sure that the universities are spending their allowances properly, and not on bubble gum and hockey cards, or in this case six-hour work weeks/six months a year for tenured professors, golden handshakes for ousted administrators, and inflated “travel and research” budgets.”

If Mr. Spry’s characterization of university culture is accurate, it got that way because university educators and administrators voted their pocketbooks. They created a system that serves their own interests, and they are motivated to preserve it.

Perhaps the students have right on their side. Perhaps they have the stamina and support to force the government of Quebec to examine its priorities. Perhaps the Occupy Wall Street protestors will soon be back, in one form or another, and will also be looking for their share of something.

Here’s hoping that if and when that happens, the victors will do more than take their spoils and run. Here’s hoping they’ll use their education to break from the I-got-mine mindset and become involved in community building, in setting and meeting the priorities that make ours a functional, healthy sustainable society

Despite years of my well-intentioned over-involvement, our kids turned out pretty great, but we could have done so much more for them by doing so much less for them. My wife and I have been the prototypical, hovering, over-involved, worry-ball toting parents that Dr. Alex Russell and Tim Falconer describe in their just-released book “Drop the Worry Ball: How to Parent in the Age of Entitlement.”

Once, before we had children, my wife and I looked at each other across the room, eyebrows raised, as our harried, new-mom friend plopped baby food directly onto her kid’s highchair tray and let him eat lunch off the tray with his hands. No plate, no utensils. Can you believe it?

“We would never do that,” we agreed with great, clucking sincerity and earnestness on the drive home.

Cut to 20 years later and of course we did that and much worse. In fact, if letting our children eat off trays, or counters, or floors was the worst bit of parenting we ever did, I’d nominate us for sainthood. No, we have made every mistake in the book and invented some that haven’t made it into the literature yet. But probably the biggest, most frequent one we made was failing to let our children fail at things. We were part of the world-is-a-dangerous-place, self-esteem-generation of parents. No risks, physical or psychic, were too small to guard against. In our defence, we were motivated by gut-twisting parental love and angst.

If you’re new to parenting, or expect to be soon, this book should be your first read. That’s because it will shape your approach to parenting in such a way that you’ll probably be able to do without many of the dozens of other parenting books that my wife and I consumed at various times. Give your kids some room to fail, for example, and you may never have to go down the “Childhood Self-Esteem” aisle in the book store.

Russell and Falconer have assembled a catalogue of ironies, immediately recognizable behaviours, and wisdom in their tightly crafted and kind book. I say kind because they never call me out by name when giving examples of the unintended consequences of my well-meaning parenting style; kind because their style is to let us reach the conclusion ourselves that we blew it rather than calling us stupid to our faces (even though I know they are talking about me.) But then that is their point. People, especially children, are better at figuring things out than we give them credit for.

Irony number one is that parents who work diligently to nurture emotionally healthy children are actually raising kids who are delayed in their emotional development; kids who increasingly lack the resilience to take on life’s problems.

Irony number two is that as a person who manages a professional services business, a person who has been to countless leadership development programs, and read shelves full of books on helping people develop, I know how important it is to let people risk failure, and to actually fail occasionally, so they can learn from the experience. It is a fundamental tenet of the business world that you need to be willing and able to fail in order to succeed. Of course, as with parenthood, very few companies actually are willing to risk failure. As one client said to me once with a straight face: “We want to be the kind of company that’s daring, that takes risks. They just have to be safe risks.”

From the opening anecdote in Drop The Worry Ball I saw myself and my parenting cohort. I know we lamented the demise of the same kind of unstructured time we enjoyed as kids, that made Baby Boomers history’s greatest generation (Ed. Oh, c’mon, please) even as we restricted our own kids’ movements to within arm’s reach, and castigated the rare parent who would let a kid go off on a solo bike ride without a GPS locator, or skate board sans bubble wrap.

“But the desire to excel at raising kids has led to the “professionalization” of parenting. All the advice, wanted or unwanted, parents receive—from magazines, radio shows, teachers, principals, counselors, doctors, dentists, nosy neighbors and even the dirty looks at the checkout line when a toddler throws an ugly temper tantrum—confirms one message:

You are morally obligated to serve your children well. Do not fail them.”

There are vivid, d’uh-of-course insights on every page. Stuff that I recognize now but often missed in the moment. Stuff that you probably recognize in other parents but perhaps don’t see in yourself.

For example, we may watch TV shows like Toddlers and Tiaras, where a bizarre subset of parents live out their own emotionally damaged needs for recognition by ensuring that their children will be even more damaged, and we recognize that for what it is: the parents’ problem.

But do we see our own version of over-involvement in the achievements of our children? Do we recognize it in the psycho hockey parent? Or in the less obvious I-got-an-A-on-my-science project parent? Or in the thousands of other ways we urgently need our kids to succeed, at everything, always?

My one quibble with Russell and Falconer comes from a life lesson parenting has taught me. Nothing is black and white. The book’s primary message is that parents need to hover less and interject themselves less into their kids’ day-to-day activities. Sit back, be mindful, and be ready to help when asked for help. I agree in principle but in practice some kids are able to ask for help, others are not. Teen boys, for example, are wired differently. Their brains still developing, many lack the intellectual capacity to understand that they need help or that help is available for the asking. Others lack the emotional capacity to ask for help. It is simply too terrifying. At what point does one specific failure topple a domino that will set into motion a series of failures that may be life-defining? Or is that just the inner voice of the hovering parent again?

Damn this stuff is hard. Get the book. It will help.

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/hey-parents-drop-the-worry-ball-let-your-kids-have-a-life/feed0Parents, Drop the Worry Ball.inddgeoffreyrowanRob Ford’s Leadership Vision: Are We Building the Toronto You Want?http://o.canada.com/uncategorized/rob-fords-leadership-vision-are-we-building-the-toronto-you-want
http://o.canada.com/uncategorized/rob-fords-leadership-vision-are-we-building-the-toronto-you-want#commentsFri, 20 Apr 2012 16:29:32 +0000http://blogs.canada.com/?p=47742]]> TORONTO – MayorRob Ford rates near the top of the charts in at least one important leadership category. He does what he says he’s going to do.

Well, mostly. There are notable exceptions. Service cutbacks, increased fees, KFC meals and cutting the gravy. (I better stop before I talk myself out of this.) But for the most part, he has been grimly determined to do the things he has said he will do, or go down swinging. He has been transparent in being who he is and living by his values, such as they are. As a city, we have gotten pretty much exactly what we voted for, so it’s a surprise when people complain about him.

Rob Ford has integrity, defined as consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations, and outcomes. There is no duplicity. What you see is what you get.

He has the determination and bull-headness that I’d want on my side, if we were ever on the same side of an issue. Well, I’d want the determination. Bullying is a failed leadership approach, which I hope he may be realizing.

But in any case, we are rarely on the same side of an issue, and the latest numbers suggest that’s still the case with the majority of Torontonians. The mystery is why. Why doesn’t he have overwhelming support, given that we elected him to do what he is working so hard to do?

The answer, is that Torontonians aren’t really mean-spirited, divisive, vitriolic and selfish. Like all people, it is possible to tap into our frustration and pessimism, as Mr. Ford did so successfully. But ultimately we grow weary of the negativity. We’re all involved in building our families, homes and communities, and you can’t build anything by pitting one group against another, or by being small-minded and pessimistic.

The innate goodness of “Toronto the Good” can’t be suppressed forever, and it is a thing to be proud of. Don’t let the snickering cynics bully you into feeling otherwise.

The Toronto Community Foundation has not. It is describing an optimistic vision for Toronto through its Bond for Toronto campaign. It is asking people of means to demonstrate their affection for their town by making a donation to the campaign. But just as important is the hopeful message behind the campaign, voiced by TCF CEO Rahul Bhardwaj.

“Toronto is not broken,” says Bhardwaj. Fraying at the edges, but not broken. His view is that we are greatest when replace divisive-us-versus-them rhetoric, come together to appreciate what we have, and work together to make sure all our neighbours are included.

“It sounds corny, but this city is lovable,” he told the Globe and Mail recently. “What we are creating is a vehicle that allows people the opportunity to demonstrate their love for the city – and that’s something that the city needs right now, is a demonstration of love.”

The TCF and its leader Bhardwaj are community builders, city builders. They understand that anger, vitriol and selfishness don’t build healthy communities, and that all of us and every business, organization and group needs a healthy community to thrive.

“’Love your city’ is not a phrase you hear often in this city,” says Bhardwaj. “Let’s create a movement of loving our city.”

That’s an idea worth getting behind. That and, get a glove and get in the game. Nobody’s going to do it for us.

Facing school issues such as declining test scores, bullying, over-sized classes, budget shortfalls, labour disputes and questions about the effectiveness of trustees, Kennedy has decided the most important educational issue of the day is mandating the singing of Canada’s national anthem.

She has proposed – and the board will use time and valuable resources to debate – that students be required to sing O Canada every day, a cappella – that is, without musical accompaniment.

What’s wrong with the country, she reasons, is that kids aren’t brave enough to sing O Canada in public.

“I think as educators we need to be instilling some better values around patriotism and good citizenship,” she said.

This would presumably be the “good citizenship” Kennedy proposed last year when attacking human rights amendments to Ontario’s Equity and Inclusive Education policies.

Her thinking is so anachronistic that it is hard to come up with an equally absurd comparison. The Cold War there’s-a-commie-in-every-closet antics of Sen. McCarthy come to mind. So do the forced public demonstrations of grief over the recent death of North Korea’s “eternal leader” Kim Jong-il.

In the 21st century, most of us recognize that attempting to legislate good citizenship is counterproductive. The most effective way to foster good citizenship is for leaders to demonstrate it. That means demonstrating involvement and service to your community. Kennedy gets credit for that, however misguided her view of what constitutes service to your community might be.

Angela Kennedy

But hers is a vision of photogenic little boys and girls in tidy lines, standing beside orderly rows of desks in starched shirts, angelically singing O Canada that is out of a past that never existed in Canada. It did, and does exist in totalitarian regimes that couldn’t inspire patriotism in their young people on the strength of ideas and leadership but instead had to rely on forced and phony photo opps.

O Canada is a beautiful anthem that honours a magnificent country. It’s lazy ignorance to think that forcing school children to sing it is going to inspire good citizenship, just as it’s lazy ignorance to think that demonizing homosexuality will inspire good citizenship. Demonstrating good citizenship – living it in our everyday words and deeds – is how adults teach children our values.

Despite lousy prospects for employment, just made worse by an Ottawa budget that will keep baby boomers filling space in the workplace until their brains turn to dust; despite no hope for home ownership; no reason to expect long-term relationships; and an almost certainty that their standard of living won’t match their parents, there are signs that millennials are rejecting cynicism and are, in fact, keeping hope alive.

My evidence comes from an experiment my colleagues and I conducted with a tool Ketchum developed in an effort to crowd-source creativity. We created a network — called Mindfire — of the top communication students from 37 colleges and universities around the world. We feed this network regularly with creative challenges from our clients. They get some real-world experience and some useful professional relationships, and we get creative ideas unconstrained by real-world experience and professional relationships. (BTW, Mindfire was just honoured with a SABRE Award for the PR industry’s new tool, but I digress in a shamefully self-promotional way.)

Late last year, after too many months soaking in media reports heavy with dissatisfaction, anger and pessimism, we wondered, given the chance, how our network of millennials might use their creativity and communication skills as a force for good. Can they be candle-lighters rather than darkness cursers?

We decided to give Mindfire a challenge from a truly unique client — the human race. We posed the question and got a resounding, Obama-esque, Jack Layton-esque, life-affirming “yes we can.”

Said one: “Let’s replace the narrative of greed, selfishness and negativity with a new human mythology, a sacred narrative of hope and kindness.”

Here’s the brief we issued:

These are tough times. Natural disasters, global recession and political unrest leave people feeling hopeless and desperate for effective ways to make a positive impact in their community and in the world. Dissatisfaction with political and economic systems is being expressed through the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

In what ways can citizens of the world restore hope? How can companies, organizations and individuals bring hopefulness back?

The answer we received in scores of responses from Mindfire members around the world was personal involvement in collecting, sharing and celebrating the stories of kindness and hope that exist everywhere. The message was: “Let’s replace the narrative of greed, selfishness and negativity with a human mythology, a sacred narrative of hope and kindness.”

Several focused on the idea of creating a simple icon that people can use as a focal point for a new sense of hopefulness and for personal involvement…

Here are some examples.

1. Better to light a candle

A lit candle is seen as a symbol of hope … Dedicating a small section a company’s website to allow their patrons to light a candle for someone or something they love would be very inspiring. Being able to click through and see thousands of lit candles with descriptions available for each one would allow people who were brought together by a particular company or organization to see what others are going through, know they are not alone and inspire hope amongst them. Some companies may even be able to donate money from each candle to a charity. – Lina Kirby

2. The keys to random acts of kindness

The motivation behind [this] is a story about a boy who was headed home to take his own life when a peer stopped to help him carry his books. Years later he shocked his graduation class with the story. The moral: No matter how small, random acts of kindness can make a difference in another’s life — whether you know it or not.

[We] designed ‘happiness cards’ which we blogged about, and painted keys as a physical symbol to keep as a reminder or pass along to someone else. We randomly passed out the keys to 150 people and asked them to visit our blog and talk about their experience.

I suggest a similar campaign using social media. It is inexpensive and can catch on very quickly. All it takes is time, energy, and positive vibes! — Grace Andruszkiewicz

3. Occupy your heart

…Take a moment to recognize all of the hard-working “do-gooders” out making a difference in our world today … this could be anything from a father working multiple jobs and juggling the responsibilities of raising a family of children while the mother serves in the military overseas, to a local elderly man who has volunteered at the Boys and Girls club ever since he graduated out of the program himself. There are plenty of people out there serving their communities, which means there are numerous opportunities to highlight the positive lifestyles of many Americans.

The goal is simply to increase awareness of all of the positivity present in the world today. Uplifting stories and feelings are contagious. — Jillian Hollis

4. Capture the moment, occupy hope

Create a “Hope-wiki where people who don’t know each other contribute to an online site for one purpose– share and spread hope. – Christine Dolendo

Others proposed corporate social entrepreneurship programs, music, celebrity engagement, viral digital and social media campaigns. But all had an element of recognizing and celebrating the good that is around us every day as an engine to create more good; to make the world a better place for all with positive energy rather than give in to pessimism. It was a hopeful result.

Take Our Poll]]>http://o.canada.com/news/millennials-reject-cynicism/feed0Millennials reject cynicismgeoffreyrowanYoung peopleMillennials reject cynicismYou say you want to lead the NDP, and Canada: Rating the candidates’ messagehttp://o.canada.com/news/you-say-you-want-to-lead-the-ndp-and-canada-rating-the-candidates-message
http://o.canada.com/news/you-say-you-want-to-lead-the-ndp-and-canada-rating-the-candidates-message#commentsWed, 21 Mar 2012 16:55:23 +0000http://blogs.canada.com/?p=40372]]>The seven people who want to lead the New Democratic Party – and ultimately Canada — are mostly tepid, vague and ineffective when it comes to communicating a vision of where they want to take us. And yet politicians of all stripes continue to be perplexed by plummeting voter turnout figures. Cause, effect.

The NDP candidates are no worse than most candidates for other parties in their inability to credibly communicate a compelling vision. Here’s a non-partisan analysis of the quality of their message.

* Based solely on the quality of message communication, Brian Topp seems the strongest of a weak field with a simply stated vision, and he scores points for courage and candour in what is needed to achieve it. His vision for Canada is equality. He says our problems are caused by increasing levels of social and economic inequality. “We must not be afraid to aggressively take on the right-wing anti-tax agenda.” That means higher taxes for wealthy Canadians and profitable corporations. Mr. Topp is unambiguous, which is a mark of good leadership communication. Raising taxes is a tough message to run for office on, but to be credible a leader has to be willing to deliver a tough message. Our leadership research (at Ketchum) tells us people don’t want bad news sugar-coated. We’re not that stupid. We want honesty and clarity.

* Thomas Mulcair whelmed us with his vision “to strengthen our credibility as public administrators.” Really? We thought he wanted to lead the country. There are many fine administrative positions. Perhaps party treasurer might be more appropriate. He also has a grab bag of other issues – women’s equality, housing, transit, pension reform and a greenhouse gas cap and trade system – that he is sufficiently vague on to lack any real credibility.

* Peggy Nash wants to “start rebuilding our economy by creating good jobs across the country…” We’re not aware of any party or candidate who doesn’t think jobs are good. She also wants to reform the electoral system, invest in affordable housing, elder care and pharmacare. And inspire non-voters to become engaged. Not with these trite, meaningless statements.

* Paul Dewar says his priorities are rooted in the priorities and values of families. His family, my family, your family. The thing about leadership, Mr. Dewar, is that you have to make choices. Different families have different priorities. Saying that your priority is based on everyone’s priority is fuzzy, disingenuous communication.

* Nathan Cullen says Canada isn’t living up to its potential. We’re falling dangerously behind on things that affect our long-term competitiveness like energy and public transit. OK, duly noted. And your answer? A vision of Canada in which every neighborhood is connected to a network of solar-powered subways? Mr. Cullen, like some other candidates, seems as focused on gaining power – join forces with the Liberals – as he is on where he’d lead us. But he gets points for communicating some specific, tough choices — higher corporate taxes and a national transit strategy.

* Niki Ashton proposes to deal with the structural factors that cause growing inequality in Canada, and adds a laundry list of a dozen issues, perhaps feeling that something will stick. More vague motherhood promises, like “make Canada a world leader in innovation.” Contrary to rumour, she did not offer “a chicken in every pot and pot in every chicken.” That was Pat Paulsen on the Smothers Brothers in his 1968 presidential bid. We understand your confusion.

* Martin Singh has published three policy papers detailing his thoughts on Canadian entrepreneurs, health care and the environment. That’s nice. He has also helpfully told his followers who they should vote for after he doesn’t make it, though as with himself, he doesn’t say why they should vote for Mr. Mulcair.

Reviewing candidate promises always reminds me of the corruption trial in New York State of the president of an Indian nation many years ago. He had been accused of buying votes. The testimony was that in order to win votes, he would buy groceries or give out $50 here and there to families he thought could use it. Sometimes the families would collect from multiple candidates, which I guess is punishment enough for the would-be vote-buyers.

But the point is that at least in those instances, the voters got something other than a promise. Most political campaigns these days involve stumping candidates offering to buy votes by promising everything any potential voter would want. Unlike the voters of that Indian nation, we usually don’t even get a meal out of it. Cynicism grows. Cause, effect.

Short-sheeting your brother’s bed is a dirty trick (“Oh, you brat!”). Impersonating a government official to rig an election is a felony.

But the sad truth is most of us don’t care. We don’t expect any better from our leaders. We don’t believe what they say, and who can blame us. In the political arena, at least, we have been conditioned to ignore all the faux wounded hyperbole and ersatz indignation of our leaders. Every day someone in government does something so egregious it can only be fixed by his or her resignation, or maybe by the prime minister’s resignation or someone’s ceremonial disembowelment. Who’s to know when something serious actually happens?

Many business leaders are just as disingenuous, obtuse, evasive and self-serving. Leadership in the worlds of religion, not-for-profits and at the local community level is no more inspiring. If perception is reality then we are one sorry family of man because around the world we perceive our leaders as a dismal lot.

You know this because you are aware of the U.S. race for the Republican presidential nomination, or our own robo-call scandal, a dysfunctional city council and mayor’s office or countless other examples that range from bumbling buffoonery to malicious malfeasance. I know it because my colleagues in research at Ketchum surveyed people in 12 countries to find out what they think about leaders. The results were dismal. (Press release on Canadian results at http://bit.ly/GCotzV)

There is a huge gap — 28 percentage point difference — between what we expect from our leaders and what we think they deliver.

Business leaders were the best of a weak lot, with a little more than a third of respondents giving them an excellent rating of eight or above on a scale of 0-10. (In Canada, leaders of not-for-profits were the best of a weak lot.) Even more surprising, among businesses, leaders in banking and financial services rated near the top of the pack. (Leaders of tech companies were rated highest by 44 per cent of respondents for effective leadership, compared to consumer packaged goods firms at the opposite end of the spectrum, cited by just 20 per cent for effective leadership.)

Truth is we don’t ask for an awful lot to rate someone as effective leader. We crave good leaders and believe that we need them to guide us through these difficult times. Around the world, across many countries and languages, people were pretty consistent about their expectations.

1. Close the Say-Do Gap – People aren’t as stupid as our leaders seem to think. If you say you love people and then you bomb them, or take away their jobs, or their health care, or abuse their trust, they will grow cynical. We want more from our leaders than catchy slogans and lyrical sound bites. We want people who lead by example, who have the courage and commitment to act, and who keep a level head in a crisis.2. Strong, Silent Types Need Not Apply – As important as it is to act decisively and with integrity, leaders also must keep people informed. In the absence of clear communication – whenever there is ambiguity – we will assume the worst. So, no to slogans and sound bites but yes to clear, consistent communication, with a little humility. Be willing to admit mistakes. Be aware that different situations require different leadership styles, and different leadership styles require different communication styles, but they all require good communication.3. Don’t sugar-coat it – The survey was decisive on this. Speak the truth with purpose and without ambiguity. We can handle a challenge if we understand it and if we know what our leaders are doing to address it.4. The way to be seen to be trustworthy is to be trustworthy – (See No. 1, Close the Say-Do Gap.) For organizations to be seen to be leaders, nothing rated higher in the survey than trustworthiness, including quality of products, services or management, financial strength, or innovation.5. Let Them Look You In The Eyes – Face-to-face communication is by far the communication channel that creates the greatest sense of leadership credibility. The lack of credibility given to some digital communication channels was surprising given their fast proliferation, but we believe Twitter feeds and social media are useless for leadership because most of the content doesn’t meet the other criteria for effective leadership. It’s usually bland marketing speak and sloganeering, and it’s rarely actually written by the leader. Does anyone believe Stephen Harper writes his own Tweets?

The bad news is we have grown so cynical that we expect our leaders are going to be even worse in 2012 than they were in 2011. There is such a powerful hunger in so many to be anointed “a leader” and then to hang onto that perceived power that they have forgotten the fundamental tenet of leadership – that they work for the people they are leading.

The good news is we have grown so cynical about our leaders — they are so lacking in credibility to us — that eventually we’ll do something about it.